The three principles of datacenter energy efficiency

There are three key principles to datacenter energy efficiency according to Subodh Bapat, VP and distinguished engineer at Sun. He shared them with the audience during his keynote address here at the Silicon Valley Leadership Group’s Data Center Energy Summit, hosted at Sun’s Santa Clara, Calif.-based headquarters.

First, there’s the principle of totality which states that an energy efficient datacenter has every component appropriately harnessed to deliver the most energy-efficient operation possible. He stressed a point often noted by The Green Grid: that the datacenter is an ecosystem and for it to be truly energy efficient, all of its pieces must work together. “It’s not just an OS problem. It’s not just a chip problem. It’s not just a server problem. It’s not just a hypervisor problem,” he began, continuing on down the list of the various technologies found in the datacenter or that connect to it.

The second principle, he said, is that of agility: “An energy-efficient datacenter must be responsive to fluctuating demands.” Those include changing network loads, fluctuating supply inputs (such as grip power availability), and changing corporate IT requirements, such as policies to reduce energy consumption or carbon emissions.

Finally, there’s the principle of proportionality, perhaps the most important of the three, according to Bapat: “An energy-efficient datacenter calibrates its energy consumption in proportion to the computational work it’s expected to deliver.”

In other words, a datacenter can’t burn the same number of megawatts whether it’s experiencing a 10 percent IT workload or a 90 percent workload. “It must scale proportionally,” he stressed.