Energy is number one cost for datacentres
Virtualisation to curb carbon emissions from Irish IT Industry
Dublin, Ireland, dateline… Energy consumption is currently the number one cost for datacentres and virtualisation could be the key to make Irish IT Industry more energy efficient, according to David McAuley, Energy Management expert with Sustainable Energy Ireland (SEI).
McAuley spoke at Novosco’s Virtualisation Briefing hosted by The Conrad Hotel, in Dublin, on Thursday 13th February. SEI is a non-profit organization created to help reduce energy and carbon footprint in Ireland.
“Our main goal is to promote sustainable energy through three key elements. The first one and most important is energy efficiency; secondly, integration and innovation, and also renewables and sustainable energy,” he explained.
The event addressed the key benefits of Virtualisation 2.0 and focused on how virtualisation can help companies achieve greater levels of availability and resilience, reduce the cost of managing and maintaining desktop infrastructure by 40% and roll out new applications, but also reduce the power consumption and carbon footprint of IT.
“From an energy point of view, virtualisation has huge potential to have an impact in the industry, since IT is growing so fast. It is a fantastic solution to prevent the increase of energy consumption because it reduces the core energy requirements. By doing this, the impacts of support system inefficiencies are kept to a minimum. This is a key principle in energy management,” he adds.
SEI offers services for businesses interested in receiving advice about energy efficiency. “It is all about optimizing the amount of energy you need. Many datacentres at the moment don’t need as much energy as they use. From this point of view, virtualization is a fantastic technology. If we can have the same system generating less heat, needing less cooling and doing the same job or even doubling the amount or work, this is a great step towards energy efficiency and it has great potential to have huge impact in the carbon emissions coming from the IT industry.”
Exact statistics on energy usage in the IT industry in Ireland are not available yet, according to McAuley. “We have only started looking at the IT industry in particular recently but data from elsewhere tells us that energy costs can be 60% of the data centre operating cost. In the US, almost 2% of the total use of electricity in the country comes from the IT industry and it has doubled since 2001/02, due to the fast increasing number of applications available. This is a very large amount of energy.”
SEI estimates it is easy for businesses to reduce 20% of their energy costs (and therefore their carbon emissions) applying some basic principles of good usage. With technologies like virtualisation, efficiency (value added for energy used) could be improved by 50%.
“I would be cautious on how much energy datacentres can save. Virtualisation is a phenomenal solution but, in the case of IT businesses, we also need to take into account factors like the age of the technology and the existing infrastructure, but it could reach 50%, if we could double the amount of work using with the same energy,” he adds.
“For a datacentre, energy is the number one cost but companies need to know how much it is costing them, in order to set targets and know where they are going energy-wise.”
For more information:
Jillian Godsil, Practice PR & Events, +353 (0) 53 94 29676
Posted in: Press Releases Tags: datacentre, energy, Novosco, virtualisation