3 suggested “best practices” to help data centers and other large consumers of electricity become more efficient in its use

Data centers are huge consumers of electricity in the United States, consuming many billions of kilowatt-hours of electricity annually, with a fair percentage of that essentially and unfortunately wasted. Squandered energy is the result of a variety of reasons. These include: (1) less-than-optimized utilization of existing servers; (2) inefficient cooling practices; (3) running redundant cooling systems at full capacity 24/7/365; (4) maintaining a status quo infrastructure rather than upgrading the infrastructure to reduce inefficiencies.

 

Likely, many small, medium, corporate, and multi-tenant data centers are not as energy-efficient as they could be.

 

Where does management at your facility stand on energy-usage assessments, upgrades, and incentives internally and among customers that reward efficiency best practices?

 

Here are three suggestions to help data centers become more efficient in terms of power consumption, utilization of resources, timing of equipment purchases:

(1) Measure: establish a benchmark to quantify capacity of space, power, and cooling assets. Software such as that available in a DCIM solution can be a big help in this;

(2) Model your infrastructure, using historical data and what-if testing. DCIMs can provide good data and visuals for this task; (3) Reduce operating expenses by taking better advantage of existing equipment that might be underutilized and decommission unused equipment.

 

Does your facility take advantage of a DCIM, or perhaps a CPMS, or some other combination of hardware and software for power and infrastructure management? Care to share?