Driving Change

By assigning an energy czar to drive IT and facility improvements, Kenneth G. Brill, CTO, Upsite Technologies, Inc., has seen a 50 percent saving in energy consumption.

“The cost of powering and cooling datacenters has increased by 500% since 2000”
-Kenneth G. Brill, Upsite Technologies

It’s likely no surprise that the rising costs of running a data center are energy-related. The fact that a 40,000 ft2 data center can consume as much energy as 20,000 people should be proof alone. While the acquisition cost for servers is continually declining, the total cost of ownership (TCO) for housing, powering and cooling them has increased by 500 percent since 2000. And these costs are obscured by IT and facilities accounting silos, which makes effective financial management grossly inefficient, and often results in poor or suboptimal investment decisions.

Increasing server TCO is an enormous economic problem for the productivity of IT, and if not addressed, one that could compromise your competitive advantage and bottom line.

Energy consumption is a proxy for data center investment. Driving energy consumption down defers or eliminates future investment in additional data center capacity, which is currently consuming 50 percent or more of IT’s capital expenditures. Controlling ever-increasing data center CapEx investment and OpEx energy costs requires accountability, in the form of a top-down reduction mandate. It’s not that your company expects or needs you to personally grasp the precise details of energy-efficient IT and facility best practices, but it ought to demand that someone be empowered to drive change, someone like an internal energy czar.

Will Forrest of McKinsey and Company and I advocate corporate average datacenter effectiveness (CADE) as a simple business metric for consolidating IT and facility asset and energy efficiency. Using a 40,000 ft2 data center, the cash flow savings using one set of proven assumptions amounts to $144 million over four years . Achieving these savings requires eliminating existing perverse organizational incentives as many of the largest savings opportunities lie between existing organizational silos (not only those between IT and facilities, but also the many functional silos within IT itself). These actions will not happen without the appointment of an energy czar empowered and accountable for driving rapid change.

One of the first projects a new energy czar should undertake is a data center check-up in each of the four IT/facilities quadrants of the CADE matrix. Identifying energy inefficiencies will be among some of the best money you will ever spent. You are likely to find very expensive energy waste and a significant reduction in capacity that is literally going down the drain.

Many will need third-party engineering expertise such as that available through Upsite Technologies, to identify energy inefficiencies. You ought to expect a targeted remediation strategy, which, among other solutions, may recommend the installation of KoldLok Raised Floor Grommets and HotLok Blanking Panels for IT server cabinets from Upsite. If followed, the remediation strategy would begin saving you operating costs immediately and offer simple payback within a few months.

As CTO of Upsite Technologies, I helped create the curriculum and methodology behind Upsite Services, a suite of specialized engineering and educational services that optimize facility energy efficiency without requiring additional capital investment. Understanding how the airflow and cooling dynamics of your data center is causing energy waste is the first step in recovering stranded capacity and freeing your company to use the computer room best practices our engineers have perfected over 30+ years.

Upsite’s introductory two-hour overview session, which looks at the fundamentals – hotspots, bypass airflow, and cooling margin available – will empower your organization with a wealth of valuable diagnostic and remediation information that I can guarantee will yield OpEx and CapEx savings. In other words, you have an enormous amount to gain, in terms of both dollars and hidden capacity, by approving your energy czar’s pursuit of a third-party data center energy efficiency evaluation. After that, combined IT and facility savings of up to 50 percent are not too unreasonable.

See Brill, Kenneth G., Revolutionizing Data Center Efficiency Update at www.uptimeinstitute.org/revolutionizing_update.