The green data center: An oxymoron?

The data center is the first and most obvious place the IT industry has looked in addressing its overzealous consumption of power.

"A data center is the single biggest computing draw you can make," said Brad Engstrom, business development manager for Cisco Australia. "Look at Google--they choose where to put their data center based on the availability of power."

With many organizations opting to use virtualization to maximize their use of server capacity, power consumption in individual racks is climbing as high as 20, 24 and 40 kilowatts per rack.

Mark Deguara, national product manager for cooling vendor Emerson Network Power, points out that at 24 kilowatts, such a rack configuration uses the same energy as 600 standard 40 watt light globes, 12 toasters or 10 electric ovens. "We're [working on] a data center at the moment that's 20 kilowatts per rack, and we're talking to a client looking at 30 kilowatts per rack, and another [client is building a room] which is 50 kilowatts per rack."

A 'green' data center?
At the same time that power consumption is increasing in the data center, several hardware vendors are using the "greening" of IT as a means of differentiating themselves from competitors.

However, with data centers chewing through enormous amounts of power, is it an oxymoron to consider any data center "green"?

"No," said David Scott, managing director of cooling specialists Emerson Network Power. "It's not an oxymoron because there are clear things all of us can do and we are doing to maximize energy efficiency. The IT hardware suppliers are continually supplying new equipment that requires less energy and therefore improving energy efficiency."

Barrie Williams, regional director of Intel Solution Services, said it needs to be remembered that being "green" is merely a concept--and not an absolute.

A data center, he argued, could be considered "green" in that it more efficiently processes applications that would otherwise be processed manually in a distributed fashion. An efficient data center, he said, is actually off-setting less power-efficient work that would otherwise be done elsewhere.

"Data centers are very hungry on power--that's true--but if you look at other manufacturing or retail organizations, right across the whole supply chain there are real energy-efficiency issues," he said.

Williams added:"[Consider] a retail organization and how they transport goods and refrigerate goods within the supermarkets. The data center is only one component. Yes, it is very hungry, but not the most hungry."

Kris Kumar, managing director of Sydney-based data center design specialists 3iGroup, can think of 50 or 100 ways one might improve the energy efficiency of a data center--but he said that for a data center to be "green" is "practically impossible to achieve".

"Power-hungry beasts can't really be green in the true sense of the word," said Kumar.

"Calling a data center 'green' is like saying your four-wheeled drive car is green because it gets a little bit better gas mileage," added Cisco's Engstrom.