Rapid IT growth is driving up power requirements in data centers, causing concern from both a cost and environmental perspective. Organizations and data center managers need to find better ways to:
- Slow the growth of power and cooling needs
- Measure, monitor, and manage data center power over the network
- Promote power efficiency considerations in data center operations
- Track power consumption and emissions to support energy conservation initiatives within the organization
Meeting the Challenges
These challenges can be addressed through a combination of the right network architecture and organizational transformation. Cisco has developed solutions for slowing the upward trend in power consumption by:
- Establishing data-center operation efficiency and utilization benchmarks
- Implementing power-consumption measurement, monitoring, and management applications
- Identifying underutilized and low-value infrastructure
- Providing accurate data on power efficiency
In addition, Cisco’s solutions are helping IT managers shift from isolated silos of servers to a community of computing and storage resources linked with an intelligent network that can be optimized for users across the organization. Known as virtualization, this approach combines the manageability and energy and space savings of a centralized infrastructure with the flexibility of a locally distributed system.
Today, Cisco offers customers a solution combining Cisco RDS 9500 Series Multilayer Directors storage switching and the Cisco Catalyst 4948 Switch virtualized fabric. This leading-edge solution increases the information storage capacity in the data center by 70 percent, thereby reducing the number of devices needed and the energy used. This solution can also help managers identify unused power capacity in their existing facility.
Measuring Improvement
Our customers and partners tell us that most data center managers do not know how efficiently their data centers are operating. The main reason for this lack of knowledge is that measurement is often a manual process, and results can vary widely within several hours of performing a one-time calculation. However, several metrics now exist that can help determine the efficiency of a data center operation. Cisco is a member of The Green Grid, a global consortium dedicated to advancing energy efficiency in data centers that works to develop better standards, measurements, and processes.
In June 2008 Cisco announced the public beta launch of the Efficiency Assurance Program www.cisco.com/go/efficiency
, a tool that helps analyze power use and establish efficiency benchmarks across facilities and the data center. With the aid of this web portal, users are able to determine the power cost, utilization rate, and carbon-dioxide emissions related to their operations.
For more about Cisco’s energy-efficient data center solutions, visit:
http://www.cisco.com/en/US/solutions/ns708/
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Power-Intensive U.S. Data Centers
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency reported in August 2007 that the energy used by the nation’s servers and data centers consumed about 61 billion kilowatt-hours (kWh) in 2006, representing 1.5 percent of total U.S. electricity consumption. This is more than the electricity consumed by the nation’s color televisions, and equal to the power used by approximately 5.8 million average U.S. households. The cost to businesses: about $4.5 billion. The federal government’s servers and data centers alone account for approximately 6 billion kWh, or 10 percent of the government’s total electricity use, at a cost to taxpayers of about $450 million annually.
