Global Data Centre power requirements grew by 63% between 2011 and 2012. Up from 24GW to 38GW in 12 months, according to the recently released DatacenterDynamics (DCD) 2012 Global Census on Datacentre Trends. A further 17% is forecast for 2013.
Global investment in data centres has grown 22% in the last year, from approximately $86 billion in 2011 to $105 billion in 2012. The largest increase in investment (23%) was in the facilities management (FM) and mechanical and electrical (M&E) sectors, including such areas as uninterruptible power supplies (UPS), cooling equipment, and data centre infrastructure management (DCIM) systems. This was up from $40 billion in 2011 to $49 billion in 2012.
This massive increase in global data centre power demand is caused by the increasing proportion of high density racks. Each rack is now consuming more power on average and the need for electrical power generation, distribution, UPS and cooling equipment in data centres has therefore grown as a result of these power increases.
Ofgem is now warning that Britain risks running out of energy generating capacity in the winter of 2015-16. A report by the UK energy regulator predicts that the amount of spare capacity could fall from 14% now to only 4% in three years, leaving Britain relying more on imported gas and extremely vulnerable to future energy problems.
At on365 we firmly believe that inefficient data centres are causing a major strain on the national grid, contributing to lowering electricity generation. Those Data Centres running nearer a PUE of 2 (rather than towards a perfect 1) would benefit from a data centre audit reviewing there M&E and data centre facilities to save energy, reduce business costs, and ensure power backup is properly in place to ensure you keep the lights on if the UK does experience ‘Delhi’ like power outages going forward.
Data centres consume between 2-3% of the UK’s total electricity and about half of this demand actually powers the computational equipment (servers and storage) with the rest being consumed by supporting infrastructure such as lighting and cooling. In addition, traditional data centres typically run only at around 10% efficiency. For Data Centres it will be important to ensure resilience in the form of UPS and generators are in place to keep data safe and business applications available 24/7.
Innovative new software and data centre design techniques can massively increase efficiency of data centre hardware by factors of 5 to 6. For example, cloud computing and virtualisation software can reduce the physical resources (number of servers) required to deliver powerful computing services. Redesigning the layout of the data centre can also substantially reduce energy costs.
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