Kenneth G. Brill, 06.03.09, 06:00 AM EDT
How the new ENERGY STAR ratings help companies save money.
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Cutting server power consumption is “green” both ecologically and financially because the greenest data center is the one you don’t build. That way you don’t need to expend more energy, you don’t need more people to operate it and you can save a bundle for the corporate bottom line.
Several years ago one of our Site Uptime Network members took my message about radically cutting data center energy consumption to heart and created competition among multiple server manufacturers. What our members found was that they could pay the same initial price and get the same or better IT performance features while saving 50 watts in energy consumption per server.
Fifty watts may not seem like much, but for a company buying 10,000 servers annually over four years, the lifecycle savings, including facility total cost of ownership in the product selection process, amounted to almost $10 million for electric utility OpEx savings. More importantly, $56 million in data center construction was deferred.
How much effort was required by the CIO and CFO to conservatively eliminate or defer $66 million in cash flow? Several afternoons of high level meetings. What executive decisions were required? Changing procurement priorities and incentives to require inclusion of facility costs and total cost of ownership in IT hardware selection decisions.
While the work required of the CIO and CFO was very modest, their CTO and his technical staff spent a lot of time and effort trying to get comparable statistics between vendors with a lot of opportunity for significant error because this is a totally unfamiliar area. The newly released U.S. ENERGY STAR® product specification for servers makes the comparison process much easier and more transparent.
Most of us know ENERGY STAR as the blue label seen on a wide variety of everyday products. The label makes it easy for consumers to find the most energy-efficient models available. ENERGY STAR for servers goes much further by requiring manufacturers to publish a datasheet with server energy consumption and a wide variety of other performance measurements. Companies self-measure and publish the data. And while this is voluntary, market pressure typically forces every competitor to participate.
