Data Center Energy Efficiency

Reducing Operation Costs of your Data Center

Total Cost of Ownership. Return on Investment. Operating Costs. It used to be that a data center was measured almost exclusively on uptime. Today, managers are being asked to balance uptime and reliability with these fiscal measurements, while evaluating increasingly complex infrastructure solutions that blur the traditional lines between IT and Facilities.

Many organizations are starting to look at improvements in energy efficiency to help lower their overall operating expense, and the data center is a clear target for these initiatives. This trend is particularly attractive when you consider that the average data center is spending more than 30% of its IT budget on power and cooling.

Saving energy not only helps an organization be more competitive in a global marketplace. It also helps the environment by reducing the businesses carbon footprint. The result? By using less energy, data centers can reduce costs and improve their public image.

Fortunately, organizations don’t have to build a new data center, or invest in costly hardware, to improve efficiencies. Consider the following:

• Have you evaluated the existing airflow in your server room to assess potential blockages or misdirection?
• Do you live in an area where you can leverage airside economizers?
• Do you have floor openings that are inhibiting the static pressure under your raised floor?
• Do you know how much power your data center actually needs?
• How are you currently measuring the efficiency of your data center?

Corporations need to intelligently allocate resources and get the most from their existing infrastructure. Optimizing your current environment will help you reclaim precious capacity and may allow you to delay, or even avoid, the time and expense required to build a new data center -- saving money and achieving immediate cost savings.