Efficiently powering an always-on world

Author:
John Collins, Global Segment Director, Data Centers, Eaton

Date
01/25/2013

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A data center's top priority has always been maintaining uptime. From this perspective, it's understandable that efficient energy use has historically been an oversight. However, the entire industry has become aware that this was changing due to federal mandates, social pressure, and a global energy crisis that has caused the cost of energy to rise dramatically. In fact, energy related costs can represent up to 1/3 of operating expenditures for data centers, which makes efficiency attractive from both competitive and societal perspectives. The key to balancing business and energy requirements is not to sacrifice reliability in the name of efficiency, but to become smarter about how we use power and collaboratively share successful techniques as they evolve. For example, common data-center efficiency losses are a direct result of computing, storage, and networking underutilization. However, much innovation has gone into minimizing these losses with the most remarkable innovation being virtualization. Virtualization allows the utilization of servers to increase dramatically by decoupling IT hardware and software. One physical server now supports multiple operating systems running multiple applications. This allows data-center operators to reduce the number of servers and for processor power to match dynamically the varying demands of application workloads across a facility. From a power perspective, what can we learn from the success of this computing model? The answer is the intelligent provisioning of power to the hardware that needs it, at the precise moment it needs it, rather than the unnecessary continuous feeding of energy into non-critical devices. This approach is a modular power-infrastructure design. The core of this design, an intelligent central-software system, continuously monitors power requirements and ensures that only the modules necessary to supply the load at any particular time are delivering energy. The remaining modules hold in a low-power ready state, and the system is ready to react instantly to changes in load level to meet demand. There are two primary benefits to this approach: The modules that are in service operate efficiently because they are highly loaded and the modules that are in standby consume very little power. As a result, large energy savings are possible without compromises in service quality. It is a system that is at the heart of some of the most energy-efficient data centers operating in the world today. For example, Iliad Datacenter, one of France's largest co-location facilities, applied a modular system combined with an intelligent energy management system to boost energy efficiency at one of its sites from 92 percent to 98 percent. If we are to continue meeting the needs of our always-on society without sacrificing the environment, we must take an intelligent, deliberate, and collaborative approach to managing power on an everyday basis. Eaton

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