Wilson decides to reduce input budget in data center

Wilson is the CIO of one of the world's top 500 companies in Asia and the Pacific. Just after the fiscal year, the company's CFO told him that, as the overall economic situation has not improved, the company decided to reduce the input budget in the data center, about 20% reduction, to come up with a specific reduction plan.

As soon as the CFO left, the CTO found the door again. Because the company is going to develop several large applications this year, the CTO has asked the company to acquire some new high-performance servers. One is to save money, one is to spend money, this "plus" a "minus" out of the "deficit" depends on his company's CIO to "fill" on. In addition, the company occupies more than 2000 square meters of data center this year also ushered in the 10th years. "Demand is increasing, the data center is at its limits, and the economic slump is delaying the new and upgraded data center agenda--all of which is a headache." Wilson said reluctantly.

According to a Gartner long-term tracking study, many large companies are now trying to avoid the cost of upgrading, expanding or relocating data centers. "The investment in large data centers, if not billions of dollars, is at least costing tens of millions of dollars," he said. Since data centers are usually updated every 5-10 years, which requires a lot of money, many companies are looking for a new alternative. Said the vice president of Gartner.

Solving energy problems

Even though it was a worry, Wilson answered the CFO and CTO with a polite smile and confidently said: "I ' m wilson,and will be soon." (Believe me, it will be done soon!) "

Although the words are so easy, but Winson under the slightest dare not slack off, hurried to do the homework. He found that electricity consumption was 35%~45% in the company's entire data center's operating costs, a surprise to him, even though it was the norm in traditional data centers. According to Schneider Electric's research data, 47% of the power consumed in most traditional data centers is spent on IT loads, and the rest is consumed by equipment such as refrigeration and lighting. In other words, 53% of electricity is "wasted".

The industry often uses PUE values to measure the efficiency of power in the datacenter, pue= total energy consumption/efficient use of energy. "Theoretically, the pue value of a reasonably designed datacenter should be between 1.2 and 1.4," he said. "Schneider Electric executive vice president, APC president and CEO Laurent Vernerey introduced." Wilson, after calculating, found that the Pue value of his company's data center was 2.13.

In this view, to reduce the budget input, we must lower the value of Pue, and the first task is to improve the efficiency of the data center. "The first step to further improve energy efficiency in data centers is to measure energy efficiency." Laurent Vernerey said. After careful "interrogation", Wilson found that the refrigeration system is the same as the server in the data center of another "Barroth", power consumption even more than the server itself.

Wilson came to the data center of more than 2000 square meters, found that some places placed too much equipment, resulting in the emergence of local hotspots, resulting in serious consumption of power and cooling resources. He had him adjust the position of the cabinet, instead of back-to-back arrangement, ensure the airflow on the back of the cabinet is smooth, and let the equipment be cooled properly. He then let the cold wind enter from the front of the cabinet, from the back of the data cabinet. This way, compared with the mode of air supply, it can save 30% of the power consumption of air-conditioning fans. "Simply moving a position and adjusting the wind direction allows us to save on the cost of acquiring more powerful air-conditioning systems and more power," he said. Wilson said proudly.

(Responsible editor: The good of the Legacy)