Experts say power, cooling issues set to worsen @ data centres

Experts have cautioned that power and cooling issues may worsen, especially for data centre, according to report recently released by Gartner.

The report also indicated that while energy-related costs account for approximately 12 per cent of overall data centre expenditure, businesses are still struggling with trying to contain these expenses.

These, analyst at Gartner said, are the fastest rising expenditure within the data centre.

Commenting on this development, director, Central and North East Africa region at global leader in energy management, Schneider Electric, Mr. Jonathan Duncan, said that Gartner’s prediction that power and cooling cost problems will probably worsen during the next few years, as organisations grow their technology infrastructure in the emergence from the global recession may not be far from the truth.

“These statistics prove that tighter management of energy consumption and related costs, within the data centre specifically, is something that has become critical for businesses across all industries,” he said.

Duncan also said that in order to achieve this improved control, the measurement of energy-related data across the entire site, including the building, the facility’s components and the Information Technology (IT) equipment portfolio, is key.

He further said that in line with this, Gartner analysts noted that continuous power utilisation effectiveness (PUE) readings to help control costs would become the norm for most large data centres, and that by 2015, 80 per cent of new large data centres would report continuous PUE readings.

APC, he said, could be of assistance to companies struggling to measure the energy in their data centres.

“We can provide the necessary tools designed for continuous, real-time PUE readings to achieve optimal operational planning,” he said.

Duncan explained that APC’s InfraStruXure Energy Efficiency solution provides current and historical PUE values, enabling a fact-based understanding of how much power is devoted to driving the installed IT-equipment compared with the total facility consumption.

“It also gives users a detailed insight into how effectively energy is utilised down to subsystem level, as well as an understanding of how to improve energy efficiency,” he said.

InfraStruXure Energy Efficiency’s web-based dashboard view, he said, includes efficiency data on current and historical PUE, as well as detailed subsystem cost analysis.

“It is available via InfraStruXure operations, which enables vendor-agnostic inventory management with real-time device failures and data shown within a company’s data centre physical layout, as well as recommendations on how to resolve issues,” he said.

As said by him, a consolidated view of the data centre has become increasingly important, and APC’s ultimate goal is to help organisations plan and manage their data centre infrastructures in a more effective manner, conserve energy and maximise their resources, thereby increasing energy efficiency and decreasing costs.

“All other lines of business within Schneider Electric also provide complementary equipment when it comes to PUE monitoring, providing users with a complete, holistic view of power consumption,” Duncan submitted.

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