Rising power costs are going to squeeze data centre operators, whether commercial or corporate, in a very painful way.
Some, just in order to survive, others because their profits are threatened, but all will be looking at ways to cut costs.
This is good news for the environment. Data centres, no matter how large or small are going to be looking at ways to cut their costs. One of the most obvious ways that they can do this is by looking at their efficiency.
In order to be more efficient, they may look at installing more efficient plant that uses less power (or in many cases more accurately loses less power).
They may look to technology – servers typically draw anything between 300 Watts and 1,000 Watts with some drawing even more power.
What about the 50 Watt server? They exist today and many organisations are beginning to look very seriously indeed at these new generation servers.
Imagine cutting the cost of running your IT to a mere 20th of what it was before! Take a typical server by a well known manufacturer.
It runs Windows 2003 server, has 300 Gigabytes of storage installed, has dual processors and 4 Gigabytes of memory.
Typically, this will have a power draw of around 400 Watts. Put this into money and it costs £315 per year to run this server at today's prices.
Imagine though if you were running this same environment on a 50 Watt server. Now it costs just £39 per year to run. This undeniably has a positive impact on the environment.
Migration Solutions is the computer room and data centre specialist;providing independent, vendor-neutral services in Data Centre Build, Data Centre Consultancy, Data Centre Operations and Data Centre Migration.
