Data Centre Effeciency
Between 2000 and 2005 the amount of energy being consumed by datacentres has more than doubled. Some industry analysts have gone so far as to predict that power usage may soon cost more than the hardware itself, therefore it's probably no great surprise that economics rather than the environment is dictating a drive towards efficiency.
As much as 60% of the energy used in a datacentre is dedicated to cooling, meaning there is margin for improvement with ranges of modern hardware that run faster and generate less heat.
Innovation such as Sun Microsystems Coolthreads technology are among the industries most energy efficient solutions to some of these datacentre issues. They are helping promote the idea that going green is a sensible and responsible way to drive higher profits.
In achieving the required levels of server capacity to meet ever increasing business needs, datacentre managers face a number of challenges:
- Balancing power budgets with cooling and space requirement in order to keep costs as low as possible.
- Making sure server resources are optimised for better utilisation.
- Ensuring that new technology and solutions can be deployed to the datacentre quickly and efficiently
- Taking action to meet increasing environmental controls and legislation designed to limit carbon footprint and wasteful energy consumption.
As well as modern energy-efficient hardware innovation, the emergence of virtualisation has opened the door to increasing levels of server utilisation. With some equipment using only 10 – 15 per cent of potential operating capacity, virtualisation allows for improved consolidation, quicker application deployment and less space requirements in the datacentre – all of which drive down costs.
ukngroup specialise in all aspects of virtualisation and are well positioned with key partners in the industry; enabling our clients to meet their datacentre requirements. Our common sense approach is the first step towards meeting individual challenges and developing a justifiable business sense solution.
