Building Energy Efficient Data Centers: Reducing expenses by turning down the heat and cultivating green datacenters. Rising energy costs have put datacenter power consumption on IT's front burner. Take a look at how you can transition to eco-responsible computing — and reduce your energy costs.

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Reducing expenses by turning down the heat and cultivating green datacenters

Hello Sun Inner Circle readers. It’s Bob Worrall back with another installment in a series of letters that I publish in this venue to share my insights into the IT industry and latest developments here at Sun. Last month, I shared some of the larger lessons I learned during my first 100 days on the job as Sun CIO. This month, I’m going to discuss an issue that’s increasingly a hot topic (literally!) in today’s datacenters — energy efficiency and eco-responsibility.

If my readers will forgive me, more often than not, CIOs don’t have a clue about datacenter energy expenses. Typically, power bills are sent directly to the real estate team or the CFO. However, with the rising costs of energy worldwide, many CEOs are beginning to hold the CIO responsible for datacenter energy costs. That simple accounting change represents a monumental shift within today’s organizations — and one that I increasingly get questioned about by executives curious how Sun is managing higher energy costs.

To answer some of the queries, I invited Mark Monroe to join me for a Q&A. Mark has been at Sun for more than 13 years, during which time he has spent some time running Sun datacenters. Most recently, Mark went to work for Dave Douglas, Sun vice president of Eco-Responsibility, and now, as director of Sustainable Computing, Mark spends his time encouraging datacenter energy efficiency and determining what portion of Sun’s energy portfolio comes from green power. He understands how Sun is turning down the heat in its datacenters in reduce energy expenses and encourage eco-responsibility.

Worrall: Mark, you’ve been part of the eco-responsibility movement for a while. Why has the issue become such a hot topic for datacenter operators?

Monroe: It boils down to simple economics. Researchers at Lawrence Berkeley Labs have done extensive studies on datacenter efficiency and energy consumption. LBL estimated that 3 percent of the entire energy consumption of the United States — including automobiles, buildings, houses, and everything else that consumes power — derives from datacenters. Furthermore, power consumption rates are following Moore’s Law: As processors become more powerful, energy consumption grows at the same rate as processing power increases. Based on that, LBL concluded that the power consumption rates double every two to four years. Plus, the study that cited the 3 percent figure was done in 2004, and today in 2007, it’s conceivable that datacenters are guzzling upwards of 5 percent to 6 percent of energy in the U.S.