Green IT Can Be Virtually Free

By Matthew Wheeland
Published April 17, 2008

IT managers are in a pickle these days: according to a recent report by the Uptime Institute, nearly half of data center managers expect to hit their maximum energy capacity in the next two years, even while IT demand keeps growing. At the same time, energy costs are making high-level computing an ever more costly core need for companies.

The result is a booming interest in energy-efficient data center solutions that won't break the bank. Ken Brill, the executive director of the Uptime Institute, spoke with GreenBiz Radio recently about some of the surprisingly easy ways to boost performance and drop IT costs at the same time, and what the Institute will unveil at its 2008 Symposium later this month.

Matthew Wheeland: Ken, thanks for taking the time to speak with us. I know we've heard repeatedly about the issues companies are facing, in terms of their IT operations, the cost and performance demands. Can you explain a little bit what the drivers are behind this and what forms are these -- are these challenges taking?

Ken Brill: Well, I think everybody is somewhat familiar with the increasing heat problems in the data center, trying to remove heat. But I believe that that is just a symptom of the larger problem. And I don't see very many people talking about what I see -- what I see is the problem. Because I believe it's fundamentally economics, and the economics come from when I first started in this field, it took about 50 years for the cost of electricity to cumulatively equal the cost of the hardware.

And when you're in the environment in which I started, the cost of facilities was insignificant, and by facilities I mean power and cooling. The cost of facilities was insignificant relative to the investment and the hardware. Well, today, depending on where you are in the world, in high utility rate areas, like the northeast part of the U.S. or in Europe or in Japan, the cost of the utilities, just to support a single one-use server, will exceed the cost of the hardware itself in less than three years.

So, you've gone from 50 years to three years in a relatively short period of time. And the problem is that we all make assumptions. We build mental models of optimizations, based on when we started, and so many people are still carrying around in their heads this optimization that the server, that the cost of electricity and power and cooling and whatnot, is insignificant, relative to the cost of the hardware, and that's not true anymore. The cost of the facility, when you include power and cooling, the capital investment, depreciation, and just the operating costs, that annual cost today is almost equal to the cost of the hardware. Certainly, over three years, it exceeds the hardware.

MW: What's behind this? Is this an increase in performance, is it Moore's Law?

KB: It's the benefit of Moore's Law. I mean, what Moore's Law has said is the number of transistors on a chip can double, he originally said every 24 months, but it's actually worked out to about every 18 months. And that has happened, but what we've kept -- we've failed to keep an eye on the ball. Because while the chip performance has been going up at about 3x every 24 months, the power efficiency has only been going up at 2x every 24 months.

So, you have more chips, but the energy efficiency of the transaction has not kept up with the rate at which the number of transistors has gone up, so you have absolute energy consumption going up. And this has been going on since 1965, and it has now come to crisis proportions. The absolute energy consumption of IT is going p at about a 10 percent per year rate, which, if you look at a national economy, we're looking at in the next five years having to build 10 1,000-megawatt coal or nuclear fired power plants just to keep up with the increase in electricity demand because of IT.

Green IT Can Be Virtually Free

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