Most IT departments have an idea of the total energy consumption of their data centers simply because they receive a bill from the utility department each month. But the ever-rising costs and lack of tools to help manage those costs constitute the source of growing frustration. How can you even start thinking about reducing data center energy costs without knowing how much energy devices are consuming?
Even if it is common sense, let’s not forget that not all servers are equals in term of energy consumption. Different internal architectures, different component types, different layouts draw different amount of electricity. Here are a few explicit numbers from our test lab:
| Device | Wattage | Yearly cost | Yearly cost (incl. cooling) |
| DELL PowerEdge R900, 2 Xeon, 32GB RAM, 2TB disk | 350 W | $346 | $851 |
| DELL PowerEdge 2950, 1 Xeon, 4GB RAM, 1TB disk | 160 W | $158 | $389 |
| DELL Modular Rack Blade Chassis, 12 Blade servers | 3 500 W | $3 372 | $8 295 |
| Cisco MDS 9506, 96 FC ports | 1 030 W | $1 018 | $2 504 |
| HP EVA 4400, 24TB | 1 324 W | $1 328 | $3 218 |
| Sun Enterprise M8000 | 7 520 W | $7 246 | $17 825 |
In the end, real life metrics are still the best way to identify power-hungry devices.
Source: SPEC
The graph below shows how much electricity internal components consume —these are the components of a 450 watt server.
Source: Ars Technica
It clearly illustrates that the heaviest energy consumer in a typical server is the power supply itself. Power conversion, AC-to-DC, and DC-to-DC, consumes a total of 163 watts. Then come the processors, and further on the disks.
Another efficient way to slow the growth of energy consumption would be to purchase servers that optimize processing power per watt space.
Running several virtual systems on a single physical machine has the obvious advantage of avoiding installing new hardware, which consumes electricity. As such, the consolidation of systems on a single physical machine through virtualization is part of many "Green IT" initiatives, and is a good way to start reducing the overall power consumption of a data center.
Like outsourcers, most IT departments act as a hosting service, for the applications of other departments within a company or organization. However, IT departments are often only seen as a cost center for the company, especially when it comes to the monthly electricity bill.
By using a product like BMC Performance Management, with Sentry Software’s Hardware Monitoring solution, IT departments can now break down the overall power consumption by server and storage device. This provides the ability to re-bill a department for the electricity costs associated to their given application.
An IT department running 1000 servers could easily re-bill around $200,000 of electricity costs to other departments. This has the clear benefit of better sharing the various costs across the different departments (instead of just IT), and also enables the IT department to communicate the fact that they are not just a cost center for the company.
If you can't measure it, you can't manage it.Lord Kelvin
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