Five Ways to Reduce Data Center Power Consumption

This white paper from the Green Grid outlines the ways that reducing energy use at the point of consumption (the server) provides benefits at all other levels by reducing load on power and cooling facilities which in turn reduces their own energy use.

The bulk of installed servers in data centers today consist of x86 commodity servers.  These servers consume much of the power allocated to IT server equipment. Therefore, the x86 servers present the largest opportunity for saving power in the data center. A signi?cant reduction in energy usage can be realized if data center professionals move away from a mindset that all servers need to be powered on at all times.

The conventional wisdom is that servers must be kept running 24x7x52 because restarting them poses a potential downtime risk.  However, research data suggests that this perception is false. Mean Time Between Failure (MTBF) statistics for components are now measured in hundreds of thousands to millions of hours.

In a series of 3 laboratory tests over a 5 month period, a total of 123 servers were restarted several times daily by disconnecting and reconnecting the power utilizing an automated power strip outlet. Out of 18,826 restarts, not a single component failure occurred.

By utilizing scripting and systems management tools such as Wake-on-LAN capabilities, most organizations can implement key energy saving processes, without impacting ongoing operations, capital budgets or system reliability.

The report includes ?ve key recommendations that will allow data center professionals to reduce their overall data center energy consumption by making changes at the server level.

Download the full report, "Five Ways to Reduce Data Center Power Consumption," by clicking the link below.