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These deals involve tying IT electricity use and building control systems together to form a better picture of real-world energy use. Businesses then use this picture of their internal “grid” to negotiate agreements with electricity suppliers, where they agree to cap their consumption in times of peak demand in return for price reductions. 

“Companies are aggregating multiple buildings, in order to agree with power companies that their buildings will shed a certain load [at peak times] in return for lower energy rates,” says Oathout. “If you amalgamate, there might be an opportunity to shed half a megawatt or a megawatt.”

Lack of trust

Despite the ample opportunity for greater efficiency through greater visibility, the take up of ‘smart data centre’ technologies remains limited so far, analysts say.

“Almost no-one is doing anything with the intelligence available to them,” says Gartner’s Simon Mingay. “IBM, HP and Sun have gone to significant lengths, as have the rack vendors, to deliver information about how much a rack or server or blade is consuming. But very few people are using it.”

“There is fantastic technology out there but no-one is using it, because they don’t trust it. [IT managers] want control, and nobody wants to give control to software, potentially putting performance at risk.”

Mingay predicts that if energy costs rise more companies will start to adopt more advanced power management technologies. But, he suggests, most of the companies using these technologies today do so for reasons of corporate social responsibility or brand management, rather than IT efficiency.

In the short term, businesses appear to be more willing to upgrade or replace IT equipment with more energy-efficient models than to undertake the large-scale improvements needed to improve power and cooling. 

One reason is the life cycle of data centres. Power and cooling systems are commonly designed to last 25 years. IT equipment has a more rapid replacement cycle, making it feasible to introduce energy-efficient replacements as part of the overall update cycle.

Arguably, this bodes well for the introduction of IT equipment with smart energy monitoring functionality. But the prospect of supplementary power infrastructure with these features looks less certain, at least among mainstream businesses.

The companies most likely to deploy building-wide energy management technologies in the data centre are those that run very large installations, such as hosting or cloud computing providers.

Google, for example, has spoken publicly about its energy use, and says that its best data centres achieve a PuE (power usage effectiveness) ratio of 1.13 – where one watt of power delivered to IT equipment carries an overhead of 13 per cent – well below the industry average of between 1.5 and 1.8. But even Google admits these levels of efficiency are only possible in its most modern data centres. 

The applicability of smart energy management will also vary according to the operating environment. For example, providers such as Google, which design and assemble their own systems are better placed to optimise their set up than data centre operators that manage heterogeneous IT environments. 

The example of hosting and business continuity provider SunGard Availability Services proves the point. “Every component of the data centre is measured and monitored,” explains Dave Gilpin, the company’s chief strategy officer. “We have a sophisticated building management system that shows every power load and cycle, down to fan speeds and return temperatures, and how many chillers I am using. We can measure this for customers at the rack level.” 

Even in an environment such as this, Gilpin says, the best possible PuE is between 1.6 and 1.7 for an air-cooled data centre in most of the UK, although a PuE 1.4 is possible in Scotland or through water-cooling, Gilpin says. This level of efficiency is about as much as can be achieved in most data centres, given the heterogeneous environments contained within them and the need to support several generations of IT equipment.  

Clearly, then, the efficiency improvements made possible by sophisticated monitoring technology are secondary to characteristics that are harder to address, such as the data centre’s size and location, and the nature of the IT environment it houses.

Furthermore, prevention is always better than cure, and there are a number of data centre efficiency measures that could provide more immediate improvements than installing a smart monitoring infrastructure, such as introducing hot and cold aisles or running hardware at a higher temperature. “Even cleaning the data centre makes an enormous difference,” says Gilpin. “We spend £50,000 every six months on a deep clean of our data centre, and that brings efficiency right up.”

Nevertheless, IT departments tend to be advocates of the power of computing to analyse and manage business functions more effectively, and there is ample opportunity for them to apply that to one of their most pressing concerns, namely data centre power.