September 3, 2008—TrendPoint Systems, provider of data center energy management solutions, has announced a four-point plan aimed at dramatically reducing energy costs and carbon emissions at data centers. A recent study by McKinsey & Co. reportedly predicted that data centers will surpass the airline industry as the largest source of carbon dioxide emissions by 2020 and called for data centers to double their energy efficiency by 2012. TrendPoint projects that by implementing only a part of its plan—focused on managing cooling costs—data centers can reduce energy cooling costs by a third or more.
The four-point plan from TrendPoint provides a comprehensive approach for actively monitoring and managing energy use in data centers. The plan will enable companies to set and manage energy budgets at the user and departmental level, allowing them to comply with proposed regulations on energy emissions, such as the Western Climate Initiative, slated for enforcement in 2012.
TrendPoint’s four-point plan for green data centers is:
- Set an energy budget—Data centers need to be able to set energy and carbon budgets that can be broken down among users, departments, and sites. TrendPoint offers each user and group a secure view of their energy and carbon usage. Companies can then set budgets and give each user access to manage their individual energy and carbon usage against assigned metrics. This is particularly important for co-location facilities.
- Virtualize servers—Companies can reap instant savings by consolidating underutilized data servers onto virtual machines on a physical server, according to TrendPoint. The company warns that virtualized servers generate significantly more heat than the under-utilized machines and, therefore, need careful attention with their cooling management to avoid the development of “server thermal inversions” within a data cabinet.
- Equalize heat and cooling balance—Data centers waste enormous amounts of energy by over-cooling the majority of their data cabinets, says TrendPoint, because CRAC units and control systems make macro-cooling decisions. By matching cooling resources (from floor vents or liquid cooling units) to the actual needs of each individual cabinet, data centers can reportedly realize significant savings on cooling energy use of 25% or more. In addition, further savings can be achieved by balancing heat loads on an intra-cabinet basis.
- Manage to the metrics—As data centers add, move, and change servers and equipment, managers need to continually monitor and manage IT equipment heat generation and cooling. TrendPoint provides a solution for managing energy usage with real-time views and long term trends of the new standard of Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE), as proposed by the Green Grid.
