IT is a power-hungry beast. Many companies don't see the impact of IT on their utility costs because there typically isn't a budget line item for electricity. When oil prices started spiking after Hurricane Katrina, IT users and their corporate masters started looking at this hidden overhead cost.
The emergence of multicore, more powerful processors and the proliferation of IP-enabled devices are driving higher power demand. Already, we're hearing stories of end users buying pallets of new equipment only to find that their physical infrastructure doesn't have the required electrical capacity. Even if they get it plugged in, the heat generated by racks of servers, firewalls, switches, routers and disk arrays is enormous -- leading to higher cooling needs, which also increases power consumption. By some estimates, it will cost more to power and cool a piece of hardware than the initial purchase.
"Power is the biggest problem on the horizon," says Rick Indyke, AMD's federal business development manager. "In the future, I'm going to have to build a power plant just for these things."
AMD, which last summer launched a marketing campaign around energy savings of its processors, is re-architecting its chips to make multicore processors as efficient as current technology, the idea being to have higher processing power within the same power envelop that exists today.
CDW-G, the federal supply arm of the giant direct market reseller, is rolling out a line of new telecommuting, security and distributed data centers, in part, to help control energy consumption. The federal government mandated that agencies give employees the option of working from home. While it may cost more to initially provision and support a telecommuter, the cost savings in terms of office energy consumption is dramatic over the lifetime of a technology deployment. And, as CDW-G points out, there's the added benefit of getting more productivity out of employees and less environmental pollution by eliminating commutes.
APC MGE is also working on new power and cooling technology to make data center energy more efficient. Today, nearly 50 percent of power going into a data center is lost in the UPS power-conditioning process. Once power is in the data center, air conditioning chews up more amps than the racks they're cooling. As Bill Bockoven, APC's director of government and education sales, explains the arms race of power and cooling must focus on efficiencies or else costs will continue to escalate.
The convenient truth, to paraphrase Mr. Gore, is IT isn't looking to save the environment. It's a welcomed benefit in which efficiencies will save money and increase IT capacity, which will lead -- in theory -- to higher productivity and profitability. For once, the environmental movement isn't coming as a cost to the business community. It may be a convenient happenstance, but one that we should all embrace. Rather than sit on our hands and watch the world melt under global warming, we should look at the technologies that will both save us money and the environment.
What are you doing about global warming and making IT more efficient? Share your stories with me.
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