Motivating co-ordination of power management solutions in data centers

Power and cooling are emerging to be key challenges in data center environments. A recent IDC report estimated the worldwide spending on enterprise power and cooling to be more than $30 billion and likely to even surpass spending on new server hardware. Server rated power consumptions have increased by nearly 10X over the past ten years. This has led to increased spending on cooling and power delivery equipment. A 30,000 square feet 10MW data center can need up to five million dollars of cooling infrastructure; similarly, power delivery beyond 60 Amps per rack can pose fundamental issues. The increased power also has implications on electricity costs, with many data centers reporting millions of dollars for annual usage. From an environmental point of view, the Department of Energy's 2007 estimate of 59 billion KWhrs spent in U.S. servers and data centers translates to several million tons of coal consumption and greenhouse gas emission per year. The U.S. Congress recently passed Public Law 109-431, directing the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to study enterprise energy use, and several industry consortiums such as the GreenGrid have been formed to address these issues. In addition, power and cooling can also impact compaction and reliability.