Data center golden rule: Do not toss your power supply (1)

Wind energy, solar energy, and other alternative energy sources receive a good return on investment.

If the data center manager has a golden rule, it is: Do not toss your power supply.For almost all data centers, their power supply is AC. AC is not only suitable for a single PC in the study, but also for data centers with a large number of servers.

The US Environment Protection Agency predicts that the energy demand for data centers will double in the next five years. Thanks to the rapid growth in energy consumption in data centers, some companies are beginning to look at alternative energy sources, such as solar cell arrays, natural gas turbines, fuel cells, and hydropower.

The biggest problem is whether these alternative energy sources can provide them with the expected return on investment. How long will it take to achieve ROI. Ted Ritter, analyst at the Nemertes Research Group's Green IT program, said: "Roi is the driving force for companies to turn to alternative energy ."

Ritter said many companies are currently reluctant to invest in alternative energy, especially whether it means that alternative energy will completely replace reliable AC power in future data centers, or it only means to supplement the AC power supply. He said that another factor to consider for switching to alternative energy is to consider a new reliable backup power, which will increase the extra cost, brings new challenges.

In this article, we will introduce some representative organizations that are working on these issues, some of them are included in the "top green organizations" report recently published by the "Computer World Website" in the United States. In some cases, these organizations hope to fully recover investment within 15 years.