Top Tips on Enhancing IT Efficiency & Cutting Your Energy Bills
In a conversation with Spiceworks, Uptime Institute’s research director of sustainability, Jay Dietrich, speaks on how companies can improve IT efficiency. He also shares some great ways to improve data centers’ ecological and sustainable friendliness.
The energy used by IT equipment makes up a sizable amount of energy used in a data center. Despite efficiency gains made over the past ten years, data reveals that a large portion of this energy usage is lost. In this article, Uptime Institute’s research director of sustainability, Jay Dietrich, provides a summary of the metrics, hardware, and software tools that can be incorporated into a sustainability strategy to increase IT energy efficiency without compromising performance or resilience.
Most data center operators and businesses simply disclose facility indicators in their sustainability reports (and strategies), leaving out IT operational efficiency. This is a lost opportunity since a data center’s IT activities contribute significantly to its energy consumption and other environmental effects. Many sustainability experts believe a data center sustainability strategy must oversee both facilities and IT operations.
According to a survey of sustainability reports by Uptime Institute, most operators place a heavy emphasis on facilities system efficiency while paying little attention to IT infrastructure efficiency. This needs to be corrected. Refer to the figure below:
IT infrastructure represents the biggest opportunity for data center efficiency improvements. In a data center with a PUE (power usage effectiveness) of 1.65, the IT equipment represents 61% of the power demand, whereas, in a data center with a PUE of 1.1, it represents 91%. The percentage of energy used by the IT equipment is measured by the data center infrastructure efficiency (DCIE) metric, the inverse of the PUE (Figure above). As PUE decreases, the proportion of energy used by the IT systems becomes more dominant.
Thus, increasing IT utilization becomes the objective. How? Uptime Institute’s research director of sustainability, Jay Dietrich, answers.
Improving IT Efficiency & Lowering Your Energy Bills
Paying greater attention to IT infrastructure
Data center managers are underselling the substantial improvements that the industry has achieved over the past decade in terms of the IT work delivered per unit of energy consumed. Uptime’s latest digital infrastructure sustainability report emphasizes innovations that have contributed to increases in data center IT systems efficiency and explores metrics and goals that can communicate these gains to investors, customers, regulators and the broader public.
See More: How Data Centers Rely on Cutting-Edge Technologies for Maximum Security
Owners and operators have many elements to consider while making their digital infrastructure more efficient, sustainable and ecologically friendly. Our latest sustainability report highlights that although it’s often under prioritized in favor of facility system efficiency, IT infrastructure represents the biggest opportunity for improvements in data center efficiency.
When operators use IT equipment more efficiently, it reduces the overall IT and cooling energy demand, associated greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, and the water use of data center operations.
– Jay Dietrich, research director of sustainability, Uptime Institute
Why is sustainability so important to the data center industry?
The global data center footprint is expanding and places significant energy and water supply infrastructure demands, says Dietrich. To mitigate the impact of this growth and address the mounting public concerns about data center environmental impacts, managers must optimize the efficiency and utility of their IT infrastructure across several operational attributes.
Ways to improve the ecological and sustainable friendliness of data centers:
- Operators should maximize the utilization of the compute, storage and data transmission capacity of the installed IT equipment to minimize the quantity of equipment, water and energy needed to deliver a given workload.
- They can increase the consumption of zero- and low-carbon energy to drive down operational emissions for the energy needed to operate the data center.
- They should work with suppliers to increase the use of recycled and low carbon materials in IT equipment, ensure that end-of-life equipment is refurbished and reused to the fullest extent, and find ways to extend the life of data center equipment further.
Data center managers best serve their business and sustainability interests by focusing sustainability investments on driving meaningful environmental improvements in the composition and operation of their IT infrastructure.
– Jay Dietrich, research director of sustainability, Uptime Institute
- They can improve environmental performance and reduce operating costs by enabling power management functions on servers and capacity optimization methods on storage products, deploying power-aware workload placement software to maximize IT equipment utilization and exercising broader control and optimization of the broader data center systems with Data Center Infrastructure Management software. This provides significantly more business and environmental value than procuring unbundled RECs or carbon offsets.
- As IT operators increase their presence in colocation facilities, IT and colocation operators will need to collaborate to address data center efficiency holistically. Regulators, customers and investors view a data center facility as a monolithic entity that delivers IT workloads. To their detriment, most colocation operators and their tenants are not working together to explain the steps they are taking individually and collectively to improve the overall environmental performance of their data center. These parties must work together to improve and publicize colocation facilities’ environmental performance and energy efficiency.
See More: Data Center Industry on the Rise Despite Outages, Sustainability Challenges
How can operators ensure IT efficiency while keeping sustainability in mind?
Operators should make energy efficiency the fourth pillar of their operational focus, giving it the same importance as performance, resilience and reliability. They must use consistent IT metrics across their owned, colocated and cloud-based IT operations and prioritize IT efficiency metrics in their sustainability reporting. Additionally, they should work with other digital infrastructure operators to develop and test different IT efficiency metrics to identify and promote a set of simple industry metrics by which to measure the efficiency of IT operations.
Managing the environmental impacts of data centers is no small task. It requires a strategy that spans all facilities and IT operations and addresses important stakeholder requirements. Digital infrastructure owners and operators must set and report meaningful, measurable metrics and goals for IT systems efficiency along with other critical sustainability elements (including greenhouse gas emissions reductions; facility system efficiency; water management; siting and design; and circular economy).
Regular public reporting of metrics and progress toward IT efficiency goals can deliver a powerful message regarding the commitment to a sustainability strategy and environmental excellence – especially as regulators and nongovernmental organizations push for the creation of IT-based efficiency metrics.
Major trends in sustainable data center design
There are many trends in sustainable data center design. Given that our latest sustainability report focuses on IT systems, we’ll specifically address several trends to deliver improved IT efficiency.
- One way to improve IT efficiency is through better use of IT equipment power management functions. Some server OEMs offer power management profiles ‘tuned’ to specific workload types, and some IT operators are testing workload groups to create a workable power management profile. This work enables IT operators to power manage a portion of their server fleet, reducing energy use by up to 10% for those operations.
- Another key trend in IT efficiency is the development of purpose-built processors and GPUs. Many cloud providers and server OEMs are developing chipsets and/or server and storage products to function more efficiently for their given workload set in their operations. Configuring servers for specific workloads increases the work delivered per unit of energy consumed.
- System-level workload management software can also help improve IT efficiency. Many software-based workload placement packages look at application hardware and service level requirements, consolidating server workloads and storage data to minimize the required equipment footprint and maximize the overall reliability of the data center. They also enable the management and optimization of workloads in cloud environments.
- At a system level, software systems can/could move workloads on a real-time basis to maximize the utilization of active equipment and put unneeded equipment into a deep idle/low power state to align workload capacity and equipment with workload demand. Coupled with the real-time management of cooling delivery, data center energy use can be minimized in concert with workload changes.
- Additionally, application designers are exploring methodologies to improve the execution efficiency of software applications that can enable improvements in energy efficiency. Work in energy-efficient application design will likely accelerate with time.
What is your sustainability strategy to ensure IT efficiency? Let us know on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. We would love to hear from you!
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