It's Time To Go Green.
Today, many data centers and IT departments overlook energy costs in favor of excess hardware capacity.
Moreover, the majority of data center facilities were not designed to accommodate the increase in energy consumption.
As a result, implementing energy-efficient practices in data centers can have high upfront costs and many companies are not willing
to make the investment, despite the long-term benefits. We have made that investment and are committed to the future.
Some Green IT Facts
- The total estimated energy bill for data centers come 2010 is $11.5 billion, up from $8.6 billion in 2007.
- 25 percent of the IT budget at a typical company goes toward datacenter costs (17 percent of the costs going to hardware and storage and another 8 percent going toward the facilities that support those machines)
- $1870 is the annual operating expense for powering and cooling a single (yes, one) midrange server in a tier 2 data center, and it reaches $2,020 in a tier 4 data center.
- It takes 30 months for 90 percent of companies with large data centers to add more power and cooling. That's two and a half years.
- The average utilization (efficieny) of the distributed systems in the datacenter today is between 5 and 30 percent only.
- Energy consumption per server is increasing by 9 percent per year
- 32 percent of all servers are running at or below 3 percent peak and average utilizations, wasting energy spinning and cooling, and doing virtually no work.
- 15 percent of rack cabinet space is not being reclaimed through techniques such as more efficient racking and the removal of servers.
- 55 percent of UPS, cooling, and other facilities are underutilized in data centers.
- Energy prices have risen by an average of 4 percent per year.
- Datacenter complexity and the large number of servers in the data center are the primary drivers of increased energy consumption for power and cooling.
- US Internet electricity usage is approximately 10 percent of all US electricity use at annual cost of approximately $32 billion and $80 billion globally.
- US data centers represent 12.9 percent of all Internet electricity usage and represents more than $4 billion in costs.
- US data centers account for between 1.2 to 2 percent of all the electricity consumed in the United States.
- By 2010, there will be 43 million servers worldwide.
- By 2010, 75 percent of organizations will use full lifecycle energy and CO2 footprint as mandatory PC hardware buying criteria.
- By 2011, suppliers to global organizations will need to prove their green credentials via an audited process to retain preferred supplier status.
Environmental Considerations
Beyond the cost savings you stand to reap from bringing green practices to your datacenter, there are also environmental considerations. Whether or not you're concerned about your company's carbon footprint, legislators are becoming increasingly interested. Here are more figures to chew on:
- Data Centers produce 170 metric tons of CO2 worldwide currently per year. (As an interesting point of comparison, that's more CO2 than the entire country of Argentina produces in a year, which totals 142 metric tons.)
- 670 metric tons of CO2 are expected to be emitted by data centers worldwide annually by 2020.
Are You Ready?
Costs, environmental impact, and government interest -- what other motivators do you need to realize the urgency of adopting greener strategies? Hopefully these numbers provide some perspective on where things stand and where they're possibly headed.
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