Energy Efficiency in Data Centers: How to Reduce Power Consumption in Data Centers by Optimum UPS Loading

Computation and data center has a huge value tomodern enterprise. This has resulted in the installation ofmillions of data centers in business around the globe.Historically, the cost to power and cool these facilities was smallrelative to the investment in servers, storage units and otherequipments. Today, however, the annual power and cooling costsof typical data centers are almost equal to the cost of hardware.In the past decade, India has witnessed an exponential increasein the demand for digital storage, from 1 petabyte in 2001 tomore than 34 petabytes by 2007. They also continue to grow at acompounded rate of 25-30%. Datacenter growth is basicallydriven by increasing requirements from the sectors such asfinancial institutions, telecom operators, manufacturing andservices. While large financial institutions and telecomcompanies are likely to build captive Datacenters for hostingtheir growing data storage needs. Datacenter service providersare expected to invest significantly to multiply their capacities, soas to fulfill the demand arising from small and midsize users.Datacenter is highly energy intensive. With the increasing energycost, the increase in operational cost is inevitable. Therefore itbecomes necessary to reduce the energy consumption to offset theincreasing operational cost and to maintain competitiveness.Existing Datacenters need to adopt the best practices in design,operation and maintenance to achieve operational excellence.The increasing IT business process outsource from foreigncountries has resulted in phenomenal growth of Datacenters inIndia. The total datacenter capacity in India is growing at a rapidpace and is expected to exceed 5.1 million square feet by 2012.The primary scope of this paper is to provide a framework inwhich data centers, large and small, could analyze and reducetheir power consumption. This paper provides a quantitativeapproach to understanding energy efficiency within a server andwithin a data center. A panorama for power minimization andenergy efficiency beginning with the basics of dual in linememory modules (DIMM) selection, configuring processors withreduced power states, options for constantly spinning disks,power management features in operating systems and otherinternal equipments.