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January 8, 2008

Globally, average server power consumption actually doubled between the year 2000 and 2005. This is despite increasing environmental concerns. Overall, server power use is growing faster in the Asia Pacific region than anywhere else on the globe. Japan isn't part of that trend, however.

As a whole, China, India and Indonesa are growing at a rather fast pace, fueling growth for the Asia Pacific region, which also includes Australia, Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, Thailand, Vietnam and other countries.

Total data center electricity costs reached US $7.2 billion a year, and further increases projected for 2010 would require the creation of 10 new 1,000-megawatt power plants, according to some industry observers.

The huge increase points to a global problem exacerbated by data centre managers not following best practices, such as using hot and cold aisles to optimize cooling and airflow, Koomey says.

Global power consumption actually doubled to 123 billion KWH by the end of the five years studied, including servers and associated cooling and equipment.

IT and facilities budgets are usually separate, so there's no incentive for IT to spend an additional dollar to improve efficiency, even if that dollar results in five-dollar savings in the facilities budget. Additionally, data centre space is usually paid for by the square foot, even though most of the costs are for power and cooling rather than floor space.

If you're not showing people the cost of their actions, they're not going to behave in a way that's cost-efficient, some industry observers think.

Most data centres today aren't operating at peak efficiency. Of concern is that this is no fault of the people running them. They're embedded in a system that has incentives that are a bit misplaced.

Some say there's no concrete data showing whether data centres tend to be less efficient in certain parts of the world. People building data centres in China are likely to have the same expertise as those in the United States.

In any case, the regional distribution of data centre electricity use shows a growing need for more efficiency in every part of the world.

Overall server power consumption is based on IDC's data for server shipments and its global installed base. Predictions are based on current trends, taking into account improved efficiency due to server virtualization and other factors.

Eight years ago, the United States accounted for 40 percent of all server electricity use, while Western Europe accounted for more than 25 per cent and Japan a little more than 10 per cent.

IDC now predicts that the U.S. share will decrease to 34 per cent by 2010, while the Asia Pacific region's share will probably be 16 per cent, up from one-tenth in 2000.

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Source: The WHIR