In a recent survey conducted by the Uptime Institute, enterprise data center managers responded that 42% of them expected to run out of power capacity within 12-24 months and another 23% claimed that they would run out of power capacity in 24-60 months.  Greater attention to energy efficiency and consumption is critical.

A report from the EPA to Congress detailed that Data center sector consumed about 61 billion KWh in 2006 - approximately 1.5% total U.S. electricity consumption at a cost of ~$4.5 billion.  These amounts are projected to increase to 100 billion kWh in 2011 or ~2.5% of total U.S. electricity consumption and ~$7.4 billion

With the cost of energy skyrocketing at the same time as user demand for more performance is increasing, IT managers are facing a power, space and cost crunch. Some data center managers have already reported that the cost of electricity and cooling in the data center are exceeding the cost of the equipment itself. IDC estimates for every $1.00 spent on new data center hardware, an additional $0.50 is spent on power and cooling, more than double the amount of five years ago. According to Gartner, 70 percent of CIO's are reporting that power and/or cooling issues are now their single largest problem in the data center. Gartner estimates that 50 percent of data centers in 2008 will have insufficient power and cooling capacity to meet demand with 48 percent of the data center budget being spent on energy, up from 8 percent a few years ago.

It is clear that IT managers need new ways to reduce power as they increase data center performance. Blade servers are a key server consolidation and infrastructure management technology whose deployment can deliver the needed increase in performance while giving data center managers new ways to cut power consumption and costs.

It may seem counterintuitive. Blade servers pack more horsepower into smaller chassis and enable a greater concentration of compute power in the data center. With multiple, highly compact blade servers, a single blade server chassis can deliver more compute resources than racks of individual server towers or rows of server racks. But this increased density can translate into higher power consumption per square foot. How does one get around this physical limitation? Besides adopting blade server architectures in the data center, it takes smarter planning, superior power management tools and effective utilization of advanced new technologies such as virtualization.

The Green Grid is a global consortium dedicated to advancing energy efficiency in data centers and business computing ecosystems. While even small percentage increases in efficiency can make a significant difference in your energy costs, a focused plan of action can result in significant savings.

The first steps are accessing your current environment and monitoring and measuring your data center's current energy utilization.  Having a holistic understanding of your data center’s environment will help you increased awareness of your critical risk factors.  Data Center Managers can ill afford to allow themselves to be reactionary to demands placed on them for denser and more power hungry applications. Putting together a plan based on a benchmark of performance metrics, and a punch list of opportunities for improvement is essential. Major power reductions can be achieved by utilizing cooling best practices, removing or consolidating underutilized servers, understanding the total life cycle energy cost of any new IT equipment and utilizing the most energy efficient equipment where ever possible.

Financial incentives may also be available from your energy company for reducing your the energy consumption in your data center.  Progressive energy companies like PG&E are leading the way in offering their customers to take such financial incentives and are also encouraging other energy companies to do the same.