Saccades

Data centers account for approximately 1% of total energy consumption in the US. Many data center operators are struggling with availability and cost of power necessary to operate sprawling racks of IT equipment and are looking for technology solutions that can give them better control over their IT environments. The core issues are related to gross over-provisioning of servers and lack of suitable controls for allocation of computing power and cooling capacity. In response, most large IT vendors are scrambling to create “Green-IT” offerings focused on reducing power consumption and improving equipment utilization. In this video, Scoble interviews Chandrakant Patel of HP Labs’ Sustainable IT Ecosystem Laboratory for a perspective on their approach to a data center of the future.

HP uses rack level monitoring to track power consumption and temperatures across the data center floor and adjust settings on cooling equipment and servers to conserve power. They’re trying to use information from various sensors and system analytics for right-provisioning of infrastructure components based on the current demand and service levels. (This is not a novel approach as many other companies are doing the same thing).

A few practices that can reduce the overall energy footprint of a data center:

• Provide the right amount of power for compute, cooling and storage resources
• Allocate workload based on need
• Take out unnecessary redundancy
• Minimize material use to reduce amount of discarded waste
• Monitor components for intermittent errors