For many years, data centers have been vilified as energy hogs. Tons of equipment, running 24x7, with the goal of zero downtime, generating copious accumulated heat to remediate, meant high energy demand and huge cooling bills. According to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), data centers consume as much as 20 times more energy per square foot than a typical office building, and have traditionally been the largest cost center for many organizations. It was accepted for decades that a data center should be kept near meat-locker temperatures in order to protect the function of the equipment within.
Pressure to reduce the enormous energy waste and introduce more savings has come from both within data centers as well as from environmental groups who have been critical of such energy waste. CFOs realize that sky-high energy bills are not just a foregone conclusion of doing business, and are demanding improvement. The federal government has issued a mandate to reduce spending on its computing infrastructure, targeting data center consolidation and efficiency improvements. Mounting societal pressure includes a recent report from Greenpeace outing the biggest energy consumers and questioning whether their power is sustainably sourced. With all this negativity, what is keeping data center operators from addressing this waste? A simple answer may reside in the question, “Where to start?”