Julius Neudorfer - Energy saving retrofit/rebate opportunities for data centers

Data centers are key to the operation of virtually every organization today. Whether they are directly owned and operated by the organization, or indirectly utilizing hosted services such as websites or email. The power and cooling requirements of IT hardware in these data centers have changed radically over the last decade and many older data centers are not equipped to effectively or efficiently support the new higher density loads. Recent studies, conducted by the US EPA of over 100 data centers, found that the majority of data centers used as much energy to power and cool their IT equipment as the equipment used itself. In fact several studies have shown that over a the typical three year life of a small server, the cost of the energy required to operate and cool equals or exceeds the cost of the server. In many cases data centers designed and built five years ago are not as efficient as those built today. If your data center was built prior to 2000 chances are it uses up to 50% more energy to power and cool the actual computing load, than it could if it were retrofitted with more efficient power and cooling systems. Cooling uses the most energy outside of the computing load. Typically there are data center operating improvements that involves little or no capital investment to improve the cooling systems efficiency. Besides improving the physical infrastructure of the data centers power and cooling, newer IT hardware, such as bladeservers and virtualization software have radically changed the computing landscape. Server consolidation and virtualization can drastically lower the amount of physical servers and reduce the amount of energy required to deliver today's computing requirements. Whether large or small, chances are your data center energy efficiency could be improved. Depending on age and design, the improvements could save between 5% and up to 50% of your IT load and the supporting infrastructures' energy costs. There are many resources to help you manage your data centers efficiency, the U.S. Dept. of Energy provides analytical tools as part of their efforts to improve the energy efficiency of data centers. Visit the Dept. of Energy for more details - www1.eere.energy.gov/industry/datacenters. The Con Edison Commercial & Industrial (C&I) Energy Efficiency Program as well as the NYS Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA) provide financial incentives and technical assistance to assess and improve the efficiency of your data center. For more info about the Con Edison C&I Energy Efficiency Program, please visit conEd.com/energysavings or call 877-797-6347. For more info on NYSERDA, visit www.nyserda.org or call 1-866-NYSERDA or (518) 862-1090. Julius Neudorfer is the CTO of North American Access Technologies, Inc., Hawthorne, N.Y.