Energy Now Fastest Rising Cost For Data Centres

Gartner is warning companies to focus on controling the energy consumption of their servers and IT equipment, after it found that energy-related costs account for approximately 12 percent of overall data centre expenditure.

The research group’s findings that data centre energy costs are a rising concern has been a well documented issue for a while now in the data centre industry.

But Gartner is warning that energy is the fastest-rising cost in the data centre, and power, cooling and energy supply issues, as well as cost problems, are only likely to get worse during the next few years, as organisations grow their technology infrastructure as they emerge from a recessionary period.

Continuous PUE

This echoes Gartner’s warning back in May that data centres are set to face a rapid rise in problems associated with power, cooling and space, thanks to the new generation of high-density equipment.

“With upwards of 5 percent growth for server shipments predicted per year over the next two years, organisations need to forcefully control their energy consumption and costs,” said Rakesh Kumar, research vice president at Gartner. “To do this, data centre operators need to measure energy-related data across the whole site, including the building, the facility’s components and the IT equipment portfolio.”

Interestingly, Gartner believes that continuous power utilisation efficiency (PUE) readings will become the norm for most large data centres. Indeed, by 2015, it predicts that 80 percent of new large data centres will report continuous PUE readings across the data centre.

“However, despite the wide availability of measurement tools, experts and consultants on the topic, data centre operators struggle with the best place to measure the energy in their data centres,” said Kumar. “What is needed is a breakdown of the ideal approach to data centre energy management into a pragmatic approach that will provide sufficient information for most operational planning purposes.”

Pragmatic Management

Gartner says users need to measure across six areas: building, electrical facilities, building facilities, racks, IT hardware and virtual machines (VMs) to build up a complete picture. “By measuring across these areas, data centre operators can obtain a highly detailed, comprehensive and, in most cases, a real-time usage picture of the energy that is being consumed across the whole site,” Gartner said.

“There is increasing attention on data centres to reduce energy use for both business and environmental reasons. Hopefully, these Gartner findings will help organisations realise that they need to start correctly monitoring their energy use if they want to better manage costs and performance in their data centres,” said Brian Murray, consultant at IT service provider 2e2 (formerly Morse).

“Research from Vanson Bourne in April showed that 70 percent of IT departments didn’t know how much energy their data centre used,” Murray added. “ Without this knowledge, actually attempting to reduce energy bills will be a difficult, if not futile, mission. Measuring energy use to get a fuller view of costs is a vital first step. Once organisations have a full overview of where energy is being used and how much it is costing them, they will need to find ways to bring it under control.”

Sweat Those Assets

Murray warned that it is simply no longer sustainable to keep increasing energy costs by expanding server capacity in the “traditional” manner, i.e. by simply adding more servers. He said that organisations should first make sure that they are using the resources they already have to their best potential.

“Rather than immediately sourcing new servers to deal with an upsurge in business, organisations should make sure that, through consolidation and where necessary virtualisation, that the IT assets they already have are being fully maximised,” Murray stated. “This way, physical IT can be reduced, and energy costs better managed, without affecting the data centre’s performance.”

Additional information is available in the Gartner report “How to Measure Energy Consumption in Your Data Center” and at the Gartner Data Center & IT Operations Summit in late November in London.