Energy Hogs on the Server Farm

In his work helping organizations improve data center efficiency, Steve Kaplan's first questions are how much energy they use and how much it costs.

"The CFOs [chief financial officers] don't know. The CIOs don't know," said Kaplan, president of consulting firm AccessFlow Inc. in Benicia, Calif. "They just accept it as a cost of doing business and pay blindly."

But energy consumption is becoming a much more high-profile issue for CIOs as it constrains data center growth. A 50,000-square-foot data center uses approximately 4 megawatts of power, or the equivalent of 57 barrels of oil a day. Although no one really knows how many servers are spinning in the United States, research firm IDC estimated there were 1.8 million new servers installed in 2002, and by 2009, that number will increase to an estimated 4.9 million per year.

With electricity costs rising, the expense of powering and cooling that equipment is becoming more of an issue than server purchases themselves.

Early in 2006, Sunnyvale, Calif.-based chipmaker AMD surveyed 1,200 data center customers, and 83 percent of the respondents identified power as a top concern. Yet fewer than 30 percent of those companies have an action plan to tackle the issue.

Even legislators are starting to show concern. Noting that the annual cumulative energy cost for servers and data centers in the United States is approximately $3.3 billion, U.S. Rep. Anna Eshoo, D-Calif., introduced legislation in July calling for the Environmental Protection Agency to research ways to reduce data center electricity consumption.

Public-sector IT organizations are getting squeezed from two directions. Information previously stored in courthouse file cabinets must now be accessible online around the clock. The push for more Web-based services has led to the rapid growth of power-hungry data centers, while at the same time governmental entities are making commitments to reduce energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions.

Yet until recently, IT executives have had little awareness of the problem, said Richard Hodges, principal at GreenIT, a Sonoma, Calif.-based consulting firm that helps IT organizations focus on environmental sustainability.

"Only in the last six to eight months have CIOs started to look at ideas to reduce energy consumption in the data center," Hodges said. "It's tough to get this to be part of their mindshare, because they don't pay the bills. If CIOs were cross-charged for 25 [percent] to 30 percent of the energy bill, they'd pay attention to it. It's a result of siloed organizations. IT and facilities can no longer afford not to talk to each other."


Gold Camp Seeks Efficiencies
In California, the state's ambitious plans to cut greenhouse gas emissions have put P.K. Agarwal in the spotlight. As director of the state's Department of Technology Services (DTS), Agarwal oversees an agency that spends $2 million a year on energy in its data centers, and is seeing demand for its data services to grow by 15 percent to 20 percent per year. The DTS, however, is not shying from a goal set in an executive order by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to reduce state government's energy consumption by 20 percent by 2015.

"During last summer's heat wave, there were 20 days when the state was consuming power at levels not expected until 2011," Agarwal said, "so there's a great sensitivity to this issue."

Schwarzenegger created a "Green Action Team," a Cabinet-level task force to implement sustainable building practices and energy-conservation efforts throughout California.

"With such visible sponsors and a commitment at the top, there'd be no place to hide from this issue even if we wanted to," Agarwal said with a laugh. "We have a chance to be a role model on this issue, so what better way than to set some aggressive targets."

Agarwal said he believes that through purchasing more energy-efficient servers and retrofitting buildings, the state's IT infrastructure can cut