In terms of securing power supplies, the growing need for basic housekeeping in the data centre is becoming ever more urgent. If I were to ask any data centre manager what their most compelling reason for making changes would be, I bet they’d rank cost reduction way before power continuity. Why?

Firstly because cost reduction is an established boardroom issue and secondly, electricity, as with most other utilities in the developed world, is still taken for granted.  

The Carbon Trust estimates that businesses in the UK waste some 10-20% of the energy they buy through poor control. The prospect of energy rationing has already been tabled in Parliament in the UK and in 2006, hosting companies in the centre of
London were vying with the Underground to secure enough power to feed their huge data centres beneath the city’s streets.  

According to Sun Microsystems, between eight and ten percent of servers in data centres have no identifiable function. The company announced in August that it had cut the number of racks of its own servers from 95 to five. It also recently consolidated multiple European data centres into one facility in Hampshire, thus reducing server and storage space by 80%.  

Data centre association AFCOM worryingly predicts that over the next five years, power failures and limits on power availability will halt data centre operations at more than 90% of all companies. Research organisation Gartner echoes this by predicting that 50% of current data centres, by 2008, will have insufficient power and cooling capacity to meet the demands of high-density equipment. 

So, what can be done? Here are some tips:  

1. Optimise existing equipment before adding in new server hardware.
2. Archive outdated legacy applications.
3. Turn applications off when they are no longer needed.
4 Reduce storage capacity by outsourcing storage needs.
5. Calculate how much power you actually do consume (it’s astonishing how many businesses don’t know this!).
6. Categorise loads as critical, essential and non-essential to decide what sort of UPS protection each one requires.
7. See if it is possible for separate business units to share servers.
8. Explore initiatives such as Grid Computing and Virtualization: www.grid.globalwatchonline.com and Virtualization – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
9. If you do have to purchase new UPS or server equipment, insist that energy efficiency is a leading criterion.

Energy management and control will continue to grow into the ‘hot topic’ within data centre power management and is a key aspect covered in the Riello UPS Power Protection Guide.