Data Center Power Consumption

Data centers worldwide now consume more energy annually than Sweden. And the amount of energy required is growing, says Jonathan Koomey, a scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

From 2000 to 2005, the aggregate electricity use by data centers doubled. The cloud, he calculates, consumes 1 to 2 percent of the world’s electricity. Just in the US alone that translates to an annual cost of over $4.5 billion.

Data Center Power Consumption

It’s hardly a secret that there is a serious demand for saving power in data centers. In a recent NY Times Magazine article:

Data centers worldwide now consume more energy annually than the entire country of Sweden. And the amount of energy required is growing, says Jonathan Koomey, a scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

From 2000 to 2005, the aggregate electricity use by data centers doubled. The cloud, he calculates, consumes 1 to 2 percent of the world’s electricity. Just in the US alone that translates to an annual cost of over $4.5 billion.

Data center capacity and consumption is pretty interesting when you look at all the variables involved. Growth, power costs, facility size, technology available, even foreign politics play a role in what it costs to operate. While servers certainly require plenty of power, the data center infrastructure uses the same amount of electricity as the servers.

Cooling and power conversion systems soak up half the total power of a data center and are one of the best places to start when it comes to making the data center more efficient.

The EPA makes a host of recommendations for cutting down infrastructure energy use and claims that if all of them are put into place, data centers can see up to an 80 percent improvement in energy efficiency. Suggested changes include improving transformers and uninterruptible power supplies, installing higher-efficiency chillers, fans, and pumps, and installing direct liquid cooling systems.

On the server side, the report recommends enabling power management on all servers, aggressively consolidating servers and storage, and eliminating unused servers.

We feel that any true Unified Monitoring solution needs to include these critical metrics so that you can begin to track and report on this critical datacenter measurement.

Fig 1: Power Monitoring

The Nimsoft POWER probe will garner data from your electrical units and UPS health and produce Green Grid Metrics: Describing Data Center Power Efficiency using Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) and its reciprocal, Data Center Efficiency (DCE) metrics, which enables data center operators to quickly estimate the energy efficiency of their data centers, compare the results against other data centers, and determine if any energy efficiency improvements need to be made. Initially this probe supports APC and over time we will add support for other hardware producers.

You are also able to create thresholds and produce alarms based on those thresholds when breached. Plus the Unified Reporter can assist you with your reporting needs.