Notes on Data Center Power
Get Beyond PUE
Get Beyond PUE
PUE (power usage effectiveness) is a metric used to determine the energy efficiency of a data center. This is determined by dividing the amount of power entering a data center by the power used to run the computer infrastructure within it. PUE is a great start, but managers need to understand the IT power efficiency of your equipment. With a fixed cooling infrastructure, upgrading IT equipment to lower the power consumption will make your PUE go up.
You can't manage what you don’t measure, so be sure to track your data center's energy use. To effectively use PUE, it's important to measure often. Sample at least once per second. It’s even more important to capture energy data over the entire year, since seasonal weather variations affect PUE . To locate “hot spots” and better understand airflow in the data center. In the design phase, physically arrange equipment to even out temperatures in the facility. Even after that,
Its Cool to Be Warm
Increase inlet temperatures for servers to 80.6 per ASHREA (American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers) recommendations. Use hot/cold aisles to decrease cooling requirements and optimize air flow
The need to keep data centers at 70°F is a myth. Virtually all equipment manufacturers allow you to run your cold aisle at 80°F or higher. If your facility uses an economizer run elevated cold aisle temperatures to enable more days of "free cooling" and higher energy savings.
Facility Utilization an Operational Key
Eliminate all those bottlenecks that get built into the infrastructure through disconnected silos of servers or storage arrays that come in months or years apart. There is plenty of good data centerware now available that can get various departments to talk to each other, share resources, and, in turn, save costs.
Chillers typically use the most energy in a data center's cooling infrastructure, its largest opportunity for savings by minimizing their use. Take advantage of "free cooling" to remove heat from your facility without using a chiller. This can include using low temperature ambient air, evaporating water, or a large thermal reservoir. While there's more than one way to free cool, water and air-side economizers are proven and readily available
PM Integration Needs to Be in Place
Power management needs to be integrated directly into capacity and performance management. This is ultimately about the transactions per kilowatt hour. Understanding server efficiency is an important metric.
Maximize capacity and reduce power consumption through intelligent technology refresh decisions.
Get Updated and More Efficient with IT
Virtualization is an important factor here. Consolidating servers and storage arrays to use far less power and increase capacity utilization can have a huge positive power impact right away--not only over the long haul.
Know That Application Usage Drives the Data Center
Realize that application service levels drive the entire vehicle—including data center power, capacity and performance-level decisions. Always keep this as priority No. 1.
Keep Looking Ahead at New Possibilities
When planning ahead for a new data center or a DC addition, research new concepts such as tiered data centers, application quality-of-service grouping, storage pooling, and active/active multi-site configurations. This is where the data center is going in the future, so you might as well be on board early.
Use Power Chargebacks in Your Billing
Implementing chargebacks to share power costs amount the various corporate departments receiving IT services make the issue more visible to the managers who can make a difference. Including power usage into a chargeback mechanism is also a better method to allocate virtual machine charges to eliminate over-provisioning and under-utilization. Otherwise, many users will simply take advantage of the resources for as long as they can get away with it.
You can minimize power distribution losses by eliminating as many power conversion steps as possible. For the conversion steps you must have, be sure to specify efficient equipment transformers and power distribution units (PDUs). One of the largest losses in data center power distribution is from the uninterruptible power supply (UPS), so it's important to select a high-efficiency model. Lastly, keep your high voltages as close to the power supply as possible to reduce line losses
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