An Opportunity for IT to Drive Energy Policy

Data center carbon emissions are expected to surpass those of U.S. airlines within 5 years. This is causing regulators to target data centers. With Cap and Trade legislation on the horizon, the rising price for electricity is going to hit a company's earnings hard. Moreover, the Administration—as well as the public—currently views business as part of the environmental problem, not part of the solution.

Increasing energy costs, legislative issues, and public image concerns are prioritizing IT's role on the agendas of Fortune 100 CEOs and even their boards of directors. This presents the CIO with an opportunity to drive strategic direction in a significant way: by defining your company's energy policy. Power Assure can help you develop a new company energy policy and provide significant savings along the way by helping you move from an “always on” to an “always available” strategy.

Moving from “always on” to ”always available”

Electricity typically consumes at least 25% of a company's IT costs. The root cause of this high expense is that data centers are built to remain “always on”. The purpose is clear: you cannot accurately predict data center demand. If you can't predict demand spikes you are forced to build to meet peak demand. The problem is that during non-peak periods, when servers are not needed, they are still drawing an average of 70% of their maximum electrical load. Today's servers—even the newest, most efficient servers—vary their electrical demand between 60% and 100% based on load, while your actual application load may vary from 5% to 95%.

The solution is to move to an “always available” strategy. Power Assure's software allows you to do this by keeping the optimum number of servers online at any time to meet actual customer demand. Servers that are not needed to meet demand are taken offline, automatically. They are brought online dynamically as demand increases, thus matching customer demand with the computing supply needed to guarantee expected service levels. The normal swings between peak and non-peak usage become a cost reduction opportunity if you can respond in real time. In a recent study of Power Assure's software for the Silicon Valley Leadership group, Accenture found a 68% cost reduction by moving to this “always available” model. By varying the number of servers on or offline at any time, Power Assure allows you to achieve a constant utilization of your “needed” servers at 75%, resulting in a corresponding flat (and much lower) cost per transaction.

Improved Service Uptime

Today's data centers require permanent uptime AND reduced energy consumption. Unfortunately, every additional "9" in uptime percentage typically increases costs by a factor of ten, including energy consumption due to redundancy requirements.

Power Assure is committed to reducing the energy consumption of data centers by at least 50% without compromising service levels. The company has developed a solution to eliminate the high incremental costs of service uptime improvements by using dynamic and automated load shedding and shifting procedures that respond automatically to changing service level requirements.

For companies with multiple data centers (typically a main site and a disaster recovery site), Power Assure recommends running a partial environment at each data center, turning off or sleeping “unneeded” equipment and turning on that equipment automatically as demand rises or emergencies occur. Overall, this saves significant energy and increases availability because no traditional hot or cold standby servers are used. Hot standby sites usually carry no load but burn energy; cold standby sites take a long time to come online (typically it may take anywhere from 24 to 48 hours for a cold standby site to come up). Being part of a Power Assure-managed server farm increases capacity because all servers at all sites are used. Response time also improves since all sites are ready for production. Servers can be booted up quickly, avoiding the complex database and network failover procedures of alternative approaches.

The Power Assure platform reacts automatically to unforeseen events to optimize data center operations. By automating your own processes in our business automation engine, Power Assure's software can respond effectively to a wide range of problems — from a single server outage to an entire site going down — without manual intervention. Power Assure allows the servers across multiple data centers to be managed as a pooled resource, facilitating management for maximum efficiency. Power Assure also factors in utility alerts, demand response requests, and time-of-day pricing vs. latency considerations to optimize the number of operating servers at each data center.

“Save as you go” implementation

Working with utilities to qualify for rebates

Power Assure can help

Data Center energy costs will increase significantly over the next five years. Pending Cap and Trade legislation will further escalate these costs. But these changes can be an opportunity to strategically drive your company's energy policy and reap significant efficiencies for the business. Every dollar cut from your electrical bill flows straight to the bottom line. Power Assure can convert your data center energy costs from fixed to variable cost, reducing it by an average of 50% as a result. These savings are not only good for business, but help improve your corporate image as well.