Reduce the ICT Power Bill Now

Vendors have come up with a new way of selling their products: electrical power savings. Is this the only way to reduce the power bill? Selling the carbon footprint doesn’t go far with the CFO. Actual energy cost reduction, more than 25%, will certainly get the CFOs attention. This will be more than buying new equipment. Software management of power, selecting the right VoIP/IPT solution and adopting new power saving standards will all contribute to lowering the power bill.

In our 2-day workshop we discuss “Cutting the Corporate Energy Bill: Reducing the IT Power Bill; Desktop to Data Center.”  This is not your typical overview, nor is it solely focused on the data center like most vendors are promoting. In this workshop we explore the closets, network and desktops. I have a long list of suggestions and recommendations to cover, all of which save energy.

Some of the issues I will be covering are:

• Power will be the second biggest ICT cost after salaries in 2009.
• Where does all the power go?
• What energy solutions are available today for the desktop, closets, network infrastructure and data center?
• Locating those areas that will produce the largest savings.
• Why cooling ICT technology costs nearly as much as powering the ICT technology.
• How the future design of microchips will affect power consumption in virtually all ICT products.
• How to analyze the power consumed in the closet for switches, PoE, UPS and cooling.
• What virtualization of the server and storage can do for the data center power consumption?
• How do you go about measuring the power consumption?
• What to believe when vendors compare their products power rating to their competition.
• What are the best practices to follow for reducing power consumption?

One of the problems is that CIOs and IT managers do not get the power bill for the data center. The bill is part of the facilities cost. The average electrical power consumption for a data center power bill is 575 kilowatt hours per square foot per year. That works out to be about $50 to $70 per square foot per year. What is the size of your data center in square feet?

What is even more problematic is that no real measurements are made of the power consumption of the closets and desktop power consumption. I have not found available published figures on their consumption. The closets and desktop power costs are lumped into the facilities power cost. They can not be separated and so are essentially invisible.

Because the power costs are hidden, there have been no incentives to make power cost reduction part of the ICT product procurements. If the CIO received the power bill and had to cover it in the budget, then equipment procurement would change to favor the lower power consuming products.

I expect energy conservation to become a hot topic this year. It is unavoidable. Look at your own cost of energy at home. The residential electrical power consumer will see 5% to 15% power bill increases every year for the foreseeable future. The same increases will hit the ICT organization as well. Some ICT centers are moving to states where the power costs are lower.  Yet the move is costly and the option of ICT Power reduction was most likely never considered.