Data centers form a basic infrastructure for almost every economic activity. Neither industrial production nor research and development is conceivable today without data centers.
Improve your data center efficiencies with these 3 steps data centers, like power supply and transport routes, are a necessary infrastructure for business, administration, and research today.
Data center managers understandably wonder if some of the things they’re doing to reduce energy use will have real payoffs. Statistics show that every kilowatt saved from equipment upgrades could double the total kilowatts of power in a data center.
This list gives an overview of some of the most important things you can do to save energy in data centers.
As these data centers become more advanced, they will no doubt keep asking people what the next big data centers will offer and how to calculate and set capacities for size, functionality, or other characteristics.
Resource monitoring in the data center
The first step in improving data center efficiency is to monitor the equipment and the physical racks and cabinets that the equipment resides on. IT teams should attempt to measure and collect information about power consumption at the cabinet, rack, and device levels.
Businesses should also control power delivery for each site so they can better control deployment, capacity, and restart. Those running a data center could potentially see even greater savings, especially if they take the time to find the most up-to-date and practical solutions.
For a deeper level of monitoring, IT teams can implement intelligent rack PDUs and DCIM software. These tools provide information on how to reduce energy consumption and the best locations to install new servers considering power, humidity, or temperature.
Depending on the level in the IT stack on which cloud service is located, a distinction is made between infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), and software as a service (SaaS).
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Teams can monitor the overall data center layout, power usage, and workload of IT equipment. You should also set up notifications, alerts, and alerts for non-critical or critical events.
While intelligent rack PDUs offer some benefits, they can also present some challenges, such as networking PDUs. Many IT teams avoid adding PDUs to the network because specifying an IP address for each one becomes expensive – sometimes as much as $400 per port. To minimize costs, IT teams can consolidate IP addresses.
Smart PDUs allow consolidation of IP addresses, allowing you to manage multiple PDUs together – 32[PDUs] can be under a single IP address. This consolidation significantly reduces the number of IP addresses required. But IT teams must ensure they allocate primary and alternate PDUs for failover redundancy in the event of dropped network connections.
Avoid data center hotspots
The second step in improving data center efficiency focuses on data center temperatures and humidity. To manage data center temperatures, IT teams should prioritize proper airflow management rather than simply adding cooling capacity. Unguided airflow can create data center hotspots and limit rack density and capacity.
To avoid this, teams should direct cool air to reach IT equipment using infill panels and containment strategies. This helps maintain control over inlet temperatures and reduces the volume of cool supply air. In addition, teams should ensure that hot exhaust air does not mix with cool air.
The IT department can use sensors to monitor the temperatures at the top of the cabinets and compare the results to site standards. Additionally, IT teams should look for built-in environmental monitoring that can better track device performance and moisture levels.
Companies considering intelligent rack PDUs should look for ones that can handle a minimum of 60 degrees Celsius.
Find lost power capacity
Another way to improve data center efficiency is to find servers with idle power, as this wastes valuable processing power. These ghost servers consume power but do not run any workloads.
To identify potential ghost servers, IT teams should check the CPU utilization of their servers and determine if they have any remaining capacity. Make sure you’re not exceeding the threshold you set or barely using any of the available capacity budgets.
This is where monitoring tools and intelligent rack PDUs can help, as they provide information about available capacity and the potential impact of deploying additional servers. Once IT teams find idle server power, they can consolidate servers and applications and better distribute the workload of data center equipment.
