Eco-Efficient Datacenters: Where’s the Money?

June 10th, 2008 by Richard Chart

Global warming does not seem to have reached the UK yet this summer judging by my week here, but it has definitely been climbing the IT service provider’s agenda, to the point where The Web Hosting Industry Review dedicated their May edition to the subject (everybody needs their “green edition”).

Actually one of the most entertaining panel discussions at the Hosting Transformation Summit in London this week was titled Eco-Efficient Datacenters: Where’s the Money? Panel members included Jeff Lowenberg (The Planet), Michael Winterson (Equinix), Lex Coors (InterXion BV) and Tony Day (APC). The panel was moderated by Andy Lawrence at the 451 Group.

Judging by the debate, the European hosting companies have a fight on their hands keeping the politicians out of the datacenter. With green issues being even higher on the political agenda than in North America, and the vast energy requirements of modern data centers becoming more widely known, there are some legislators and “Eurocrats” sniffing an opportunity to add to the hoster’s power headaches. Never mind the fact that escalating power costs are incentive enough for these companies to be as efficient as possible.

The panel discussion ranged widely between big picture green issues, and the technical challenges of retrofitting older data centers to be less power hungry. There are many incremental improvements to be had, but Tony Day pointed out that the biggest and most immediate savings are to be had simply by running our data centers hotter.

The American Society of Heating, Refrigeration and Air-Conditioning Engineers say data centers can operate at 77F. Most modern rack-mounted computers can run happily a long way higher than that, and yet most data centers are cooled to the high sixties (many of our customers now use EM7 to trend the environmental fluctuations across their data centers using environmental probes as well as readings from the servers themselves).

For the hosting companies this is a matter of educating their customers, so that raising the data center temperatures is seen as a welcome green move rather than a lowering of quality of service.

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June 10th, 2008