Accenture Report Finds Data Centers Can Drop Energy Use by Half
In partnership with the Silicon Valley Leadership Group, Lawrence Berkeley Labs, the Department of Energy and others, the new report shows how adopting energy efficiency policies and hardware management practices can lead to significant cuts in power consumption for any data center. Read More
In partnership with the Silicon Valley Leadership Group, Lawrence Berkeley Labs, the Department of Energy and others, the new report shows how adopting energy efficiency policies and hardware management practices can lead to significant cuts in power consumption for any data center.
The report released this week, the “Data Center Energy Forecast Report,” offers 17 case studies of 11 different technology initiatives that companies have implemented in response to a call by the U.S. EPA last year for detailed information about best practices for reducing data center energy use.
Data centers account for an already large — and quickly growing — consumer of the domestic energy supply. The EPA report found that between 2000 and 2006 data centers’ energy use more than doubled, reaching a total of 1.5 percent of the country’s electricity, more than all the color televisions in the country in that year.
As a result, the EPA called for dedicated efforts to identify best practices in energy efficiency for data centers, and the SVLG and Accenture report is intended to offer some insight into those best practices.
In short, the report finds that the EPA’s goals of overall energy use reductions of 55 percent are achievable, in some cases immediately and in some cases as the state of the art improves. Some existing technologies, like modular cooling systems, data center airflow management, high-voltage AC power and server consolidation can reach these savings for almost any data center, existing or newly commissioned. Other practices, like harnessing free cooling from outside air or water, can have significant impacts but are limited to a smaller number of data centers.
One example offered in the report is a server consolidation project undertaken by Sun Microsystems, which allowed the company to reduce its data center floor space by 88 percent while dropping power consumption by more than 60 percent and saving at least $9 million in costs for building new raised floors.
The full Data Center Energy Forecast Report is available for download from GreenerComputing.com.
