As I wait (day 3) for the furnace repair person to arrive, I add up the money I’m saving by not using the furnace. I’m heating my tiny office with an electric space heater, and later today, I’ll get a fire going in the woodstove to bring the rest of the house up to a cozy 62 degrees. But I fear the money I save on heating fuel I spend on electricity for several computers.
An article on SearchDataCenter.com, “IT energy crisis reaching critical mass,� reminds us that prices for electricity are on the way up – and I mean way up. Bob Doherty, a data center manager quoted in the story, said his electric company just announced a 27% jump in price. And if that wasn’t bad enough, it seems that the most rapid increase in demand for power will be coming from IT equipment. “More powerful machines packed into tighter footprints is causing cooling headaches, and cooling that equipment eats up a lot of power,� the article says.
According to American Power Conversion Corp., an IT infrastructure vendor also quoted in the article, the total cost of ownership for a rack of servers is between $80,000 to $150,000 per rack, and power consumption accounts for 20% of that cost.
Yikes.
So have you started turning your machines off at night? What is your office doing to manage IT power?
Posted by attaltiet on January 13, 2008 - 01:33 PM
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