by Billy MacInnes
2 October 2008
Businesses are
fighting an uphill battle to contain and reduce power consumption in data
centres.
Figures from IDC reveal the amount of energy they require is
"climbing at a worrying speed" and rose by more than 13% between 2006
and 2007.
Underlining the
extent of power usage, IDC reported that the amount of electricity required by
servers in Western Europe in 2007 was almost twice that needed to power all
street lighting and traffic signals in the UK. Data centre consumption levels
were more than two and a half times higher at 40TWh.
Nathaniel
Martinez, IDC programme director, European Enterprise Servers, revealed that as
much as €4.4 billion was spent on powering data centres in Western Europe last
year.
"Unless a
drastic change in products and company practices occurs," he warned,
"things will not get any better in the future. In 2012, we could face a
scenario where for every euro spent on buying new servers, more than €0.80 will
be needed to power the existing datacenter infrastructure."
Martinez
suggested businesses needed to "encourage a much tighter cooperation
between facility management and the IT department, which, in most cases, still
work without any coordination whatsoever".
Giorgio Nebuloni,
research analyst with IDC European Systems and Infrastructure Solutions, added
that the efforts of IT vendors to build energy-efficient components were
"not enough to balance the rise of energy needs.
To contain them,
organisations have to act on the infrastructure level, adopting best practices and
redesigning their facility to improve cooling and power processes".
