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The “Green Revolution” has had builders of commercial facilities vying for certification as being environmentally friendly. However, it is not driven solely by altruistic concerns about global warming and dwindling sources of energy. Going green can have real and positive impacts on the cost of businesses making use of those facilities. This is especially true for IT data centers. Many high-level corporate decision makers are avidly seeking solid information about ways to adjust their data center planning and what to look for in the IT server market. IT departments have lagged behind facility planning in adopting green technologies. However, trends in the data center have now begun to force the matter to a head. As the amount of computational capacity per physical space within data centers continues to climb, power and cooling requirements have emerged into the forefront of challenges facing data center architects. It is no exaggeration to characterize the situation confronting many organizations as a data center energy crisis. Many data centers have reached full capacity, limiting their organization’s ability to grow and make necessary capital investments. They want the latest generation of servers but cannot use them because there is not enough electrical power and/or not enough cooling. In many urban centers, where space is at a premium and public utilities are strained to the limit, data centers may be severely restricted in their options regarding power and HVAC capacity expansion. There are locales where the municipal utilities themselves cannot accommodate requests for further electrical power to a given address, because the distribution grid or the generating capacity has reached its limit.
In all areas, whether urban or rural, rising energy consumption has also claimed the attention of those concerned with the bottom line. As the cost of many IT resources have leveled off or even fallen, the increasing cost of energy has come to represent a growing percentage of a data center’s total cost of ownership. According to analyst firm IDC, for every dollar spent on computer hardware roughly 50 cents is spent on energy for power and cooling — an amount expected to increase by 54 percent to 71 cents per dollar over the next four years.2 If trends continue on their present track, in the near future there will come a point where energy costs more than the servers themselves.
For all these reasons, the use of electrical power has become a critical factor in planning data center infrastructure. Increasingly, the power consumption rating for any given component of an IT infrastructure environment is only one of many interrelated facets to consider. Blade servers are positioned to help address the issues of power consumption and, accordingly, cooling requirements. The goal of infrastructure design and planning is to take a more holistic approach in order to reduce the power consumption/heat emitted wherever possible. When applied to data center servers, this can encompass everything from planning the optimum location in terms of room airflow and HVAC resources, down to the design of a single blade server itself. For example, IBM internal studies show that an average IBM BladeCenter chassis with embedded Ethernet and fibre channel switches can help save customers up to 50 percent on power per port over a typical rack optimized server.
The Impact of Blade Server Systems on Data Center Power Usage
By allowing multiple individual and self-contained computer servers to share common infrastructure resources — such as power, cooling, networking, and management — of a single chassis, blade servers have enabled densities of 80 computers and more per industry standard 42U rack. Considering that the traditional standard server rack configuration is limited to a maximum of 42 computers, conserved use of space is an obvious benefit, and with real significance to the bottom line. It has been estimated that a data center space costing $20 million a few years ago can cost as much as $300 million today.3 Considerable power conservation can be realized through the pooling and sharing of common infrastructure in support of an entire chassis that can each now hold multiple discrete servers rather than a single one. The shared power and cooling of a blade server helps to reduce the amount of heat generated as compared to traditional rack and tower servers, and newer chassis designs feature sophisticated controls and adjustable cooling systems.
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