Save on Power and Energy with Data Center Green Computing
As servers become more powerful, the amount of data they store and process increases significantly. This problem only escalates further as technology analytics and cloud computing put additional pressure on data centers’ resources. As a result, servers utilize more power and energy to run, leaving data centers at a disadvantage with regards to environmental sustainability. Thankfully, there is a growing movement towards making data centers more energy-efficient and better for the environment through data center green computing.
What is Green Computing?
Green computing, or green IT, involves using IT resources to focus on environmental sustainability and energy-efficient processing to reduce resource consumption. With businesses relying heavily on data-intensive computing–such as big data analytics and artificial intelligence–to reach decisions, the consumption of power in data centers typically skyrockets, leading the way for secondary problems to arise, including data center overheating. So far, data centers that have implemented green computing strategies have been able to minimize their overhead energy consumption while maximizing their server utilization. Green computing is a core business principle that needs to be implemented in every data center to ensure IT resources’ and the environment’s longevity.
But with technology continually advancing, green computing strategies will need to be routinely implemented and checked on. If your data center is already up and running, here are five strategies to ensure your data center stays “green.”
Conduct Energy Audits
To uncover how much energy you are utilizing, you will need to find a baseline level to show your starting point. This baseline reading will allow you to discover any inefficiencies in heating, cooling, lighting, and the energy used by servers and assess their impact on energy consumption. From there, you can create an accurate long-term sustainability plan to help achieve green computing.
Place a Priority on Power
Prioritizing how efficiently you’re using power in your data center will help save you on energy costs. Utilizing energy-efficient light bulbs, motion activation for lights, and turning the lights off overnight are easy ways to save energy. Also, leveraging renewable energy sources to power lighting systems, backup generators, and other non-essential energy needs will further save costs.
Updating Your Equipment
If you are using older equipment or equipment that isn’t optimized, energy costs will continue to increase. It will be vital to update the equipment with newer models and optimize the ones you already have for energy efficiency to reduce your data center’s energy consumption. Another way to save on energy is to eliminate gaps in server racks by filling them with blank rack panes to make heating and cooling more effective.
Maximizing Server Utilization
In addition, you can improve efficiency by optimizing servers, network equipment, and storage devices. Through dynamic power management, improvements are made to servers’ power scaling abilities to reduce power consumption during idle periods without degrading performance. Also, per-drive storage capacity helps improve storage efficiency, and a decrease in network port power usage helps the overall efficiency of networking equipment.
Increase Efficiency of Your Environment
Did you know your data center’s exterior and interior environment can directly impact the efficiency of the equipment inside? To maintain the efficiency of your climate control system, there are several things you can implement, including:
- Leveraging the cool, chilly weather outside by finding ways to bring the outside air in to assist in cooling your equipment.
- Using physical barriers to contain your climate by separating hot and cold air in the data center.
- Installing variable-frequency drives to reduce the compressors rotational speed, which will reduce the usage of energy.
At Whitelabel ITSolutions we are continuously innovating to incorporate green computing practices. Since we understand that properly protecting your valuable assets is fundamental to your organization’s success. Our green computing and comprehensive security features ensure your critical equipment and data are protected at all times. Contact us to find a colocation, dedicated server, VPS, and web hosting plan that is right for your business needs.
