Eskom is in the strange position of having to ask its customers to use less of its product and of having to pay them subsidies to convert to alternative energy sources. <\/p>\n
In the corporate environment this energy shortage is equally apparent. Increasingly, IT managers are being told there is no more electricity available for their data centre, forcing organisations to relocate it to accommodate their continuing growth or to look at other strategies to reduce power consumption.<\/p>\n
A moderate-sized data centre with 100 servers and 10 terabytes of networked storage uses 1300 megawatt hours (MWh) of energy a year. It is estimated that data centres represent 2% of global energy consumption; about the same as all the world’s airlines combined. With ever increasing demands on IT, how do organisations rationalise energy consumption in the data centre while accommodating growth?<\/p>\n
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In an attempt to reduce consumption, organisations are increasingly turning to server consolidation using virtualisation technologies, such as VMware.<\/p>\n
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Studies have shown that the typical server in the data centre is running at between 10% and 15% average utilisation. Virtualisation consolidates workloads onto fewer servers running at higher utilisation. Consolidating these servers can save 650MWh of electricity per year — reducing energy consumption by 50%, and having a significant impact on the company’s bottom line and helping solve the data-centre sprawl dilemma.<\/p>\n
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Storage is another area where savings can be made in energy consumption. Storage arrays are typically configured for performance with low-capacity, high-performance drives. But when we examine data usage , we find over half the data on a normal storage area network typically has not been accessed in the last three months. <\/p>\n
Moving this data to lower-speed, higher-capacity disks can significantly reduce energy costs: per terabyte of storage, high-performance drives use four times the energy of slower high-capacity disks. Making this substitution in the data centre can save another 40MWh of energy, not as much as consolidating servers but a critical reduction if it saves you having to build a new multimillion rand data centre.<\/p>\n
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Combined, these two common strategies can reduce energy consumption by more than 50% and extend the life of a data centre. But there is another imperative driving energy reduction: global warming. <\/p>\n
In Europe organisations are being compelled to reduce their CO² , one of the principal greenhouse gasses, and the developed countries that signed the Kyoto Protocol are obliged to reduce CO² emissions by 2012 to 95% of their 1990 levels. For most countries this represents a 15% reduction in current emissions. <\/p>\n
SA is a signatory to the protocol but, as a developing nation, is not bound by reduction targets. The Kyoto Protocol does, however, demonstrate the increasing pressure being brought to bear on countries and organisations to reduce emissions. It is only a matter of time before this affects us.<\/p>\n
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In the average organisation, data centre energy consumption represents 9% of total energy consumption. For example, a data centre of 1300MWh annual consumption represents nearly 3000 tons of CO² over the typical five-year life span of equipment. Applying our two energy reduction strategies can reduce CO² emission by 1480 tons and reduce the organisation’s energy consumption 4,5%. <\/p>\n
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As IT organisations are being increasingly constrained by the energy available for their data centres, server consolidation and storage rationalisation provide two viable strategies to reduce data centre power consumption by half — while at the same time contributing to the reduction in greenhouse gasses.<\/p>\n
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SA HAS some of the cheapest electricity in the world but paradoxically it is one of our scarcest resources. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_sma_x_autopost_status":"idle","_sma_x_autopost_error":"","_sma_x_post_id":"","_sma_facebook_post_id":"","_sma_instagram_post_id":"","_sma_threads_post_id":"","_sma_x_attempts":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2280","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-hardware"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2280"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2280"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2280\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2280"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2280"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2280"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}