Data centers continue to change and evolve, and as this happens, the management demands change as well. Particularly with highly complex servers with high resource demands, it is essential to pay attention to power and cooling.
eBay Sets an Example
A good example of a company with huge resource demands that effectively manages power and cooling is eBay. Here is a peek at some of the important parts of their system:
1. The data center used by eBay is called the Tier IV Topaz Data Center. It is comprised of multiple blade servers each provisioning up to 17kW.
2. A blade server is actually like multiple servers. A chassis contains multiple thin circuit boards known as “blades.” Each one of these blades is itself a server. A multi-layer system like this increases power and efficiency.
3. These blade servers demand a high amount of power. By increasing their power supply from a traditional 208V distribution to a 400V distribution, eBay was able to reduce their energy costs by two to three percent.
4. 400V power reduces energy costs, but it does much more than that. A higher amount of power means less line transmission loss. Copper utilization was also reduced.
Other Ways to Save Power
Finding the most appropriate amount of power to use to fit your organization’s power needs can save you on costs much in the same way eBay was able to reduce their costs. Finding a power supply that is just right means identifying a voltage level that is not too much or too little. If you are unsure of the power statistics of your data center, consider investing in data center infrastructure management (DCIM) software. This kind of software can give you statistics on things like power usage efficiency.
Reasons to Use DCIM
There are a lot of things that DCIM can help you to ascertain. The amount of power being used by your servers vs the amount being put out by your generators affects efficiency, as can be understood by the example of eBay. There are other factors that affect power usage efficiency as well. Sometimes systems overheat, leading to expansive downtime. DCIM software can detect changes in power usage efficiency real-time, so you can trace the potential causes of overheating. For example, lower power usage efficiency on a hot day would mean things are overheating. The solution would be to increase power to cooling systems.
There are a lot of ways to keep track of power usage and cooling, so make it a priority with your organization’s data center.
