Why datacenter energy efficiency is important?

Computing demand across the world is growing every moment requiring more and more information technology (IT) infrastructure that in turn consumes more and more energy.

The efficiency of IT infrastructure is now at the top of the mind of business leaders, environmentalists and policy-makers.

On August 2, 2007 the U.S. EPA ENERGY STAR Program submitted a report to the congress assessing opportunities for energy efficiency improvements for government and commercial computer servers and data centers in the United States.

According to this EPA report "The energy used by the nation's servers and data centers is significant. It is estimated that this sector consumed about 61 billion kilowatt-hours (kWh) in 2006 (1.5 percent of total electricity consumption) for a total electricity cost of about $4.5 billion. This estimated level of electricity consumption is more than the electricity consumed by the nation's color televisions and similar to the amount of electricity consumed by approximately 5.8 million average U.S. households (or about five percent of the total housing stock). Federal servers and data centers alone account for approximately 6 billion kWh (10 percent) of this electricity use, for a total electricity cost of about $450 million annually.

The energy use of the nation's servers and data centers in 2006 is estimated to be more than double the electricity that was consumed for this purpose in 2000. One type of server, the volume server, was responsible for the majority (68 percent) of the electricity consumed by IT equipment in data centers in 2006. The energy used by this type of server more than doubled from 2000 to 2006, which was the largest increase among different types of servers. The power and cooling infrastructure that supports IT equipment in data centers also uses significant energy, accounting for 50 percent of the total consumption of data centers. Among the different types of data centers, more than one-third (38 percent) of electricity use is attributable to the nation's largest (i.e., enterprise-class) and most rapidly growing data centers. "

The report also mentions "Under current efficiency trends, national energy consumption by servers and data centers could nearly double again in another five years (i.e., by 2011) to more than 100 billion kWh , representing a $7.4 billion annual electricity cost."

The EPA report considered these estimates approximate due to limited availability of data on current data center energy use, but, this clearly highlights the magnitude of current energy usage and its growing trend in the data centers and need for datacenter energy-efficiency.

EPA Final Report to Congress - Executive Summary

EPA is currently developing energy star product specification for enterprise servers. More information on the current status of the energy star product specification for enterprise servers can be found at EPA website.