Rising cost of power shifts IT priorities

With the cost of electricity on the rise, IT managers are assessing ways of cutting datacentre power bills

Datacentre heat costs money

Firms will be forced to bear the brunt of soaring electricity prices that affect their datacentres and other areas of their operations. The situation is likely to see more firms seek ways to reduce consumption and improve power management controls.

Datacentre hosting companies are pushing the additional electricity costs back to IT buyers.

“Where before we would bundle the price of power into contracts, over the last 12 months we have phased in charging per kilowatt hours,” said Mike Tobin, chief executive of Redbus, which operates datacentres across Europe.

“Our last [power] price hike was 52 percent and we were lucky. Nobody likes it but if the price is going to keep on going up, the customer is going to have to pay for it.”

While consumers fret about keeping their homes warm, datacentre facility managers are more worried about cooling server rooms stacked with overheating blade servers.

The problem is particularly acute for firms running huge server farms. Google recently said it is concerned about the near-term prospect of paying more for electricity consumed in the lifecycle of its kit than for the server hardware itself.

“The possibility of computer equipment power consumption spiralling out of control could have serious consequences for the overall affordability of computing, not to mention the overall health of the planet,” wrote Luiz André Barroso, a Google engineer in the September issue of the Association for Computing Machinery’s journal Queue.

Such concerns have seen IT suppliers including APC focus on cooling equipment and services, while hardware makers such as Sun, Intel, AMD and IBM are attempting to make their chips and equipment less power-hungry.

Others are pursuing more radical approaches. DegreeC, a small New Hampshire firm, has developed systems that direct cool air to hot spots, for example. Chilled ceilings are also being considered by some server farm designers.

Yet others, such as US web hosting firm ThinkHost, are using wind, solar or other renewable sources to create a pricey but ethical approach to datacentre power consumption.