Comprehensive analysis of energy management in cloud computing data center

How does cloud computing relate to data center infrastructure? In last week's "2011 China Green Data Center Technical Conference" on Guangdong Province Telecom Planning Institute IDC Engineering Design Research Center Director Deng said: "Cloud computing data center is not necessarily equal to high-density data center, but high-density must be the development trend of cloud computing data center." ”

If the data center is not optimized for efficiency, cloud computing is bound to expand the data center's energy problems.

In the past, cloud computing has boomed, with revenue growth expected to reach 27% in the next four years. Companies see two of the benefits from cloud computing, which is that cloud computing can reduce costs and reduce energy consumption by limiting the operation of internal data centers.

Still, the Wall Street Journal notes that the number of servers deployed in cloud applications is expected to be three times times the same amount of time. While cloud computing is good for companies to share information, the power that data centers provide to the cloud may be the main cause of climate change.

And why? Because if the data center is not optimal, moving the data and computing requirements of many enterprises to a data center of a cloud provider can increase budget, resource, and energy management issues that lead them to take the cloud solution in the first place. In addition, some enterprises move to the cloud, do not check their data center performance (a small number of enterprises do a complete transfer; most businesses run a hybrid solution, where data and applications are based on the cloud and partly on existing data centers), They don't see the cost and productivity improvements that cloud computing promises.

Experts have summed up methods that enable cloud services companies and companies trying to move data and applications to the cloud to pursue the greatest cost and energy efficiency.

Maintain a reasonable size of the data center

As mentioned above, few companies move data to the cloud. They moved some data and applications to the cloud, but kept something else, especially sensitive information. However, because the project moved from the existing data center to the cloud, the company no longer uses some idle servers (or only to maintain capacity), but these idle servers still consume a lot of power and cooling. These phantom servers are used as a dedicated server for developing machines, low access to data storage servers, or a high-availability application. This happens in the Cloud data center unless they are effectively managed.

Ghost servers typically run at 15% to 20% utilization or less, but consume more power and emit more calories than the level of a fully utilized server. By finding the best possible ability to effectively balance risk tolerance, companies can recoup 8% to 10% of their resources, which are often wasted.

Evaluation upgrades

Companies that choose to move it to the cloud are making a financial choice. Once an enterprise data center is to increase its capacity in any area, which includes heating and cooling, usable electricity or physical floor space, its incremental capital expenditure can easily exceed the price of 50 million of dollars, often much higher than the cost of building a new modern data center. In addition, the data centers built before 2002 basically do not support high-density operations or deliver more than 2-kilowatt of the power or cooling to racks.

Again, when cloud computing can help solve the currency problem immediately, it simply shifts the consumer issue to another location. The cloud services provided by outsourced data centers should also be evaluated so that areas of efficiency can be recognized. Otherwise, rising costs will affect the price of the cloud services provided to end users.

Bridging the gap between it and the facility

If companies are serious about controlling costs through cloud computing and more efficient data center management, businesses need to involve all aspects of the incentive. For most data centers, electricity is the biggest item in the cost equation for the datacenter and will grow as energy costs explode. This bill is often not controlled by the IT department, but by the facilities or operations department. Transfer it functionality to the cloud, which saves on hardware, software maintenance protocols, staff, and so on, but facilities and operations can only see limited benefits if there are still machines left out when it shifts to the cloud. Conversely, when municipal power is limited to certain times of the day, the facilities and operations teams have not experienced the challenge of providing the same level of IT services with less computational power. These two teams need to work together.