8 ways to effectively reduce energy consumption in data centers

With the rise of the new generation of data center construction, with the increasing density of servers in the enterprise room, the amount of power consumption and heat dissipation is becoming the focus of enterprise IT administrators, the power consumed by the data center and the power consumption to cool these converted into heat have reached an increasing level. The huge consumption of electricity brings about all kinds of serious problems, the huge cost of electricity will increase the overall cost of the enterprise, and, in a relatively short period of time, the power supply of any data center is limited, so even by adding hardware to strive for balance, the final page will still face the problem of power supply and footprint, In the Low-carbon era of increasingly advocating green environmental protection and strict audit, it is necessary to reduce the energy consumption of data center.

The following are some ways to ensure that the minimum power supply for a data center infrastructure can significantly reduce power consumption and power costs:

1. Server Virtualization

The power consumption of the server accounts for about half of the power consumption in the whole data center, virtualization technology allows a physical server to run multiple virtual hosts, which allows the individual server's computing resources to be shared by multiple environments, and the computing resources can be fully utilized by adjusting the load of the server. Reduce carbon dioxide emissions, reduce management and operating costs.

Server virtualization technology to reduce costs is very obvious, on average, one-month cycle, and the use of multiple servers in the virtual site compared to the application of virtualization technology server sites in data traffic, energy, attack threats and total cost of ownership of the former 10%.

Virtualization technology makes the enterprise greener, running multiple servers generates a lot of heat and requires additional energy to cool it. With virtualization, 30 servers can be consolidated to 3, which can reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 15 to 30 tonnes--equivalent to a 7 reduction in the number of vehicles on the road.

2, the use of modern cooling system

HVAC systems are typically the second largest power consumption system in the data center, with data center Users Group Estimating 37% of the energy consumed in the datacenter. Air conditioning system can only achieve high efficiency when dealing with a small range, in the face of large-scale data center, most cooling system cooling task can not be optimized, cooling efficiency is very low. In general, the use of modern, modular and more efficient components to replace some traditional air-conditioning equipment cooling treatment can save a lot of electricity.

In the case of convenient climatic conditions, the use of external cold air to replace the power system for cooling and other more energy-efficient way, will be able to save more energy.

3. Reorganize Data Center

The number and size of data centers has been significantly expanded over the past few years, while servers have been installed everywhere and are poorly planned. This results in the data center heating and cooling uneven, overload IT environment is also difficult to ensure that the cooling system optimization operation.

Reorganizing the physical location of a data center server, such as configuring a cold and hot channel, can significantly reduce the load on the cooling system. Plugging away holes that cause cooling effects to decrease.

4. Upgrade Data storage

Data storage is one of the main reasons for the large power consumption in data center. Updating the storage system can also significantly reduce this power expenditure. In general, new disks are more energy efficient than old ones, while a high-capacity disk consumes less power than two of the same capacity low capacity disks. Memory virtualization can also improve energy efficiency by increasing the utilization of memory and avoiding the provision of excessive storage space. Providing energy to the free space of the memory is a great waste of power. For some applications, SATA disks can be used to replace the optical drive, which consumes twice times more power per terabyte.

5. Upgrade Transformer

A transformer is required to update the AC supply in the data center. A lot of electricity is lost in the process. The efficiency of many cheap transformers is only 80%, but through the upgrade utilization can reach 90% or more, so that the power loss can be significantly reduced.

6, the server chip update to low power consumption products

Because the server hardware is already in service life, it is obvious that a small power-hungry server CPU and other components (such as the disk drives and Transformers mentioned earlier) are needed. For example, Intel's Woodcrest dual-core Xeon processor is three times times more energy efficient than the older single-core Xeon processors, at least as seen from company product data. Even in some cases, for energy saving purposes, it should be updated when the server is not yet life-cycle.

7, carry out software audit

Running unnecessary servers makes no sense, so draw a clear and up-to-date chart that indicates which servers to run and why, so you can be clear which applications can be moved to another server. Software audits can also assist in identifying idling servers.

8. Improve cooling temperature

Data center hardware needs to be updated, perhaps with a cooling temperature exceeding the specified range. Increasing the temperature of the data center can make the temperature within the recommended range, and you can reduce the power consumption. An effective planning and modern modular system enables different temperatures to be maintained within the same device to ensure that the cooling range is within the specified range.