Data Center Energy Management

As concerns about the energy demands from computing mount, thinking about energy-efficient data center energy management is of paramount importance. According to a 2007 EPA research report, U.S. energy consumption by servers and data centers is expected to nearly double in the next five years. Currently it accounts for 0.5% of the world's energy and power consumption is expected to grow by 12% annually as companies continue to expand globally.

The leading server type these days is the blade server, logic boards consolidated in a central chassis. These deliver more computing power in a smaller physical space. While they boost performance, they have increased generated heat and power requirements. It has becomes evident that data centers will be increasingly required to handle an overall energy scenario for which they were not originally designed and built and this is the main challenge for those responsible for data center energy management.

There are software applications out there to help with data center energy management. One of them is IBM's Tivoli Monitoring (ITM) software, which consolidates views of energy management information that enable optimization across data centers and facilities infrastructures. According to IBM, more than 50 percent of the energy consumed by data centers is now utilized for power and cooling infrastructures. Its software provides the foundation of efficient data center energy management going beyond a single vendor solution by providing an interface that can be used with partners for visibility into comprehensive power, thermal and environmental data.

Elsewhere, Raritan recently introduced new data center energy management capabilities to its Power IQ Software. Power IQ tracks and keeps a repository on all types of granular power information from multiple platforms to help IT and Operations managers analyze power-related issues, ranging from IT energy costs to rack capacity to IT equipment health. Power IQ provides a consolidated view of power information gathered from IT devices plugged into Dominion(R) PX intelligent power distribution units (PDUs) and a wide range of other rack PDUs, including APC, ServerTech and Geist. It also tracks rack temperature and humidity information collected by the Dominion PX's environmental sensors.