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How to: Reduce datacenter energy consumption

While the acquisition cost for servers is declining, the total cost of ownership for housing, powering, and cooling them has increased by 500 percent since 2000. Yet research from the Uptime Institute reveals that 60 percent of the available cooling in a typical computer room is wasted due to airflow losses, also called "bypass airflow."

The upshot: You are likely spending more money on energy than necessary because of the inefficiencies created by over-capacity and poor conditioned airflow management.

But the good news is that optimizing your airflow represents the greatest opportunity for reducing operating costs and deferring capital costs. In addition, when you manage airflow more effectively, you can increase server density without adding new cooling infrastructure.

To optimize your existing computer room infrastructure, consider the following steps to resolve airflow inefficiencies:

1. Get a computer room cooling efficiency health check
If you have not embraced comprehensive datacenter monitoring -- documenting conditions such as utility load, equipment intake temperatures, UPS load, redundant cooling capacity and power usage effectiveness calculations -- a computer room airflow efficiency health check may be an appropriate place to start.

There are a range of diagnostic assessments available, and most will identify energy inefficiencies and offer a targeted remediation strategy. If followed, the plan could save you operating costs immediately, result in simple payback within a few months, and permit you the option of increasing server density sustainably.

At the very least, an expert computer room cooling health check should involve an examination of the following three aspects of datacenter health: IT equipment air-intake hotspots; percentage of bypass airflow; and cooling capacity factor (CCF), or the margin of installed cooling capacity vs. load.