Data Centre Power
The data centre challenge is not just about hardware costs. It is increasingly about
reducing energy consumption.
In the early days you may have seen cheap household fans around many data centres
being used just to keep things cool. This is no longer sufficient and sophisticated cooling
systems now need to be employed. Added to this, the requirement for very high levels
of availability mean that standby or duplicated systems are provided for business critical
data and applications.
Although hardware performance keeps going up, the performance per watt remains fairly
constant, in other words, the total power consumed in data centres is rising. The
operational costs of commercial data centres are almost directly proportional to how
much power is consumed by the equipment. Worse still, a lot of that power is wasted.
In today’s society, organisations are trying to reduce their ‘carbon footprint’ and saving
power is the name of the game in major data centres, even to the extent that many
operators turn off the lights in them when no-one is there.
This course looks more closely at the different methods of providing electrical power to
a data centre and identifies strategies to minimise the hidden electrical power costs and
face the so called IT Power Crisis.