Don’t Forget to Turn Off the Servers
After looking at data center power consumption figures for my Green Building Elements post, as well as at the US EPA’s Report to Congress calling for improvements in this area, I have noticed a host of new products coming to market that address the issue.
Changes occur so rapidly in the world of technology that new problems — and new solutions — crop up every day. One of the most glaring problems for data centers right now is that their hundreds of servers stay on at full power all of the time. The simple, low-tech solution to this problem (namely, turning the servers OFF) turns out to really not be so simple after all.
In an article for SearchDataCenter.com, writer Bridget Botelho calls server shut downs (during holidays or off-hours) “the road not taken”. Facility operators interviewed for that article cite several reasons for keeping servers going at full capacity, among them fear of lost data and simple convenience. Some facilities also claim that it is hard to establish exactly when off-hours might be — after all, who can really predict demand for internet services?
Central to this issue seems to be the fact that people are just not confident of their ability to manually manage server operations. In response, entrepreneurs are developing — you guessed it — technological solutions, which reduce the human factor in this equation.
