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Power Demand Increases
Events of the past few years have brought much attention to electricity as the most critical factor for the IT sector. The East Coast blackout of 2003, numerous hurricanes along the Gulf Coast, fires in Southern California, floods, earthquakes and tsunamis have all caused frequent and lasting power outages. Electricity is mission-critical and without electricity, there is no IT industry. Network switching gear, computers, blades and disk drives are the largest electricity consuming products. Technology packaging places more boxes into more racks in the data center, increasing heat density exponentially. Before the year 2000, servers drew about 50 watts of electricity, now they use up to 250 watts and there are more of them. Blade server technology best illustrates this point. As many as 60 servers can be placed in a standard height 42U (U=1.75 inches) rack. The typical power demand (power and cooling) for this configuration is over 4,000 watts. Multi-core processor chips help server energy consumption, but the trend for high-density packaging continues to noticeably increase both heat output and cooling requirements.
Poor storage management practices, such as keeping disks spinning with mostly low-activity data, unnecessarily increases power and cooling expense. Data centers currently use well over 100 watts per square foot, more than 10 times that of the average household. On the average, storage (mainly disk) consumes about 9% of the total energy consumed in a data center while servers average about 10.5%. Chillers, air conditioners and UPS consume an average of 60% of data center power. Reducing the energy storage devices is a noble effort but any real reductions will have to come from focusing on those items that consume the most energy. The cost of energy is now increasing between 20-40% percent annually in many geographic locations, making energy consumption a major and growing consideration in the total cost of ownership for computing equipment and when building a new data center. Energy providers show no interest in reducing rates or passing along any meaningful cost-efficiencies that they implement as their focus and mentality remains on raising rates only. This needs to change or energy will someday cost more than the entire IT infrastructure. The IT industry will be asked to spend a tremendous amount of money on energy in the years ahead while providing alternate sources of energy in case of long-lasting disasters or terrorist attacks. Remember, without electricity, there is no IT industry!
Source: Horison Information Strategies: Storage Navigator
© 2005 Horison
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