This white paper is available in PDF; a synopsis follows."
Server and data center power consumption are concerns for data center owners and managers and for policy-makers. Additionally, societal trends and interest in ‘Green’ and ‘Sustainable’ technologies have increased focus on data centers. The IT industry, policy-makers and regulators have been working this issue, focusing on improvements to infrastructure efficiency. While great strides have been made in this area, the potential for further improvement is diminishing.
At the same time, we have been learning more about how data centers use resources and the ways in which they convert resources into their end product: information. While the interest and attention on infrastructure efficiency has been warranted, the real issue with data center power consumption has been a general lack of control over how data centers utilize IT assets. If IT utilization rates had been held constant over the past eight years, it is possible that the aggregate power consumption of volume servers in the U.S. would have held close to constant as well.
Modeling work at Dell has shown that technologies and policies available to IT managers today have the potential to reverse the trend of declining IT utilization with resultant positive effects on data center power consumption. The ‘Greenest’ data center is thus, not the one with the best efficiency with respect to delivering power to the IT equipment, but, instead, the one that manages to make the best use of the IT equipment it has commissioned.
