Tips to Reduce Power Consumption in Data Center Infrastructure

Wasting critical resources, specifically energy resources is expensive and avoidable. As power costs soar, the burden of maintaining power hungry equipment like data centers gets increasingly heavy.

So how do you reduce the power consumption in data center infrastructures? Well, here are some tips that might prove useful to you:

– Switch off after use: This can mean something as simple turning off a common fan or light. If there is any equipment that you no longer need after it has served its purpose, switch it off either temporarily or permanently.

– Measure energy consumption figures and set targets: Without a proper target number to reduce the consumption to a particular level, it is practically impossible to implement any power saving strategy. Measurement of energy consumption using DCIM tools and analytics is vital to reach the target set and make the right decisions that aid the journey to the target.

– Use of Variable Frequency Drives (VFD): It is important to get rid of electric motor-driven components of the data center that continue to run at full steam, especially when the operation requiring the use of the data center uses only half of the generated capacity or even less.

– Modularization is the future: Making use of colocation-provided or in-house modularized data centers is an effective way to reduce your power bills as they are more capable of handling power consumption efficiently.

– Scalable Power and Cooling infrastructure: Resort to a DCIM strategy that increases power as well as cooling on par with the increase in load to the data center so that more power is consumed for operation and cooling only when there is more load.

The above tips should help you save considerably on your power bills and as always, keep an eye out for wastage caused by careless human mistakes as these can only be rectified by careful monitoring.

Alex Carroll

Managing Member at Lifeline Data Centers

Alex, co-owner, is responsible for all real estate, construction and mission critical facilities: hardened buildings, power systems, cooling systems, fire suppression, and environmentals. Alex also manages relationships with the telecommunications providers and has an extensive background in IT infrastructure support, database administration and software design and development. Alex architected Lifeline’s proprietary GRCA system and is hands-on every day in the data center.