Smart IT organizations now measure performance by dollars for a workload. Some companies minimize dollars by locating servers where electricity is cheap. Lopoco’s unique technology reduces electricity consumption at any data center.

From companies with modest data centers, say 1000 servers, on up to companies where data center OpEx is a huge drain on their margins, the effect on corporate valuation by even small increases in profit margins cannot be over estimated.

In data centers, the largest single component of operating expenses is electricity. High speed computers have been adding more and faster CPU’s that consume ever increasing power. Once the electricity is burned on the computers, facility must use more electricity to cool the data center. For a few years now, many companies have been working hard to lower their data center expenses by making their facility and their HVAC (Heating, Ventilation and Air Conditioning) systems more efficient, to reduce the power bill. Lowering the power consumed by the IT equipment itself has usually been overlooked because IT departments are under pressure to increase data storage and compute capacity. Facilities and finance teams have been far removed from IT purchase decisions, so optimizing dollars per workload has not happened. Lately though, the industry has started to think more and more about somehow lowering the footprint of the IT equipment itself, where in fact OpEx reductions by as much as 50% are possible. Successful projects in this category usually require finance, facilities and IT teams working together, and managed from an authority high enough to get results from both.

Getting IT and Facilities to work together to reduce data center power consumption.

This is where the role of the finance department can help. Create a cross-functional team, populated with high ranking decision makers from each of the three disciplines: finace, IT and facilities. Charge the team with specific milestones in data center power reduction, with commesurate rewards for meeting each milestone. The overall value to the company cannot be overstated.

IT products that focus on energy efficiency.

IT equipment that is designed specifically to help data centers reduce their power consumption has started to become available on the market in the last couple of years. The category of IT equipment that uses the majority of power in a data center is servers, followed by data storage equipment. While the traditional server vendors have a few offerings they are plastering with the “efficient” label, most are really just proprietary hardware offerings that are only slightly more efficient than their conventional commodity offerings. There are also a handful of startup businesses purporting to make more efficient servers, but most are found lacking the in the business continuity area. Their new architecture servers are usually winners in the density department, but not as efficient as they should be. One such startup that just announced back in August, however, focuses on the efficiency side. Low Power Company, Lopoco for short, has server products that are slide-in replacements to a customer's existing X86 servers, have a claimed dramatic power consumption reduction, with comparable performance and price to conventional commodity servers.

Electricity savings including HVAC (12¢/KWh and a 1.0 PUE)

Savings when building a data center, over 3 years

Summary/Conclusion

By taking the lead in creating a cross-discipline team to tackle data center expenses, a finance department can help the company boost their bottom line while simultaneously increasing their “green factor”, both of which important to everyone these days.