A report on efficiency, conducted in March 2014 – concluded that if companies do not change the way of design, build and operating system of data centers, annual electricity costs in this type of environment can increase to double till the end of 2018.

The first step of IT managers to cut energy costs is to know the data center thoroughly. To do so, worth from a calculation of the TCO (total cost of ownership), which corresponds to the investment to create and maintain the infrastructure and systems, combined with the usual acquisition and hardware maintenance costs to operate it.

Another point to be careful when optimizing costs with data center managers is to know the operation because this department usually pays the energy bills and therefore, IT ends up not knowing how much energy is used with servers and air conditioning.

IT is evaluated against traditional metrics such as response time and uptime, and not in terms of electric power. However, the only way to ensure more efficiency in environments not dissociate matters. Without an integrated budget, the company ends up spending much more than it is needed.

Some improvements are simple and cost very little. Among them, removing obstacles to the circulation of air can be useful. Also, before investing in new servers, worth examining whether the provision of equipment can help give more efficiency to the air conditioner. In this sense, thermal mapping tools (sold by IBM and HP, among others) help detect hot and cold spots in the environment. On the other hand, since there are companies that specialize in performing appraisal services for energy efficiency.

The proposed replacement of equipment may need to provide the implementation of cooling systems in racks arranged in rows – which can bring cool air only to hot spots – or the reorganization of runners servers, so that the cold air is directed to local hot machines.

Finally, IT must be concerned with the hardware. By cutting through virtualization or consolidation of servers, the number of machines that operate in the data center, power consumption will be lower. Also, if the equipment is not being used, should be turned off, achieves a reduction, on average, 10% to 30% in spending. A big company can save $ 250 million to improve the flow of air, maximizing air conditioning and optimizing the servers of the data center.

Another tip is to look carefully while configuring the servers. No matter what the processor is. If the power supply is more efficient, the company will save energy.

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