Electricity costs cause a rethink

Some firms considering switch to alternative methods

More datacentre hosts are considering charging per kilowatt in the face of rising electricity costs.

“Power is included in our pricing but if prices continue to rise, at some point we would have to pass that onto customers,” said John Lang, head of systems at Hostway. “We’ve had talks with the IBMs, Dells and HPs to have something that’s more power efficient.”

Lang agreed with a Google engineer, who recently wrote that power is becoming as expensive as hardware procurement over four years for entry-level servers.

Peter Hannaford of cooling equipment provider APC said that “oversizing” – bargaining for more capacity than necessary – and over-cooling are common causes of inefficiency in datacentres.

While many firms are returning to water cooling, Trox AITCS plans to launch an “electrically-benign” cooling system for blade servers at the end of this month.