By: Jeremy Swanner, Executive Vice President, Sales & Marketing for Future Resource Engineering
Maximizing energy efficiency is one of the most important jobs of a data center manager. Whether you’re in charge of a few servers or several racks, there are many simple improvements that can be made which will lead to significant cost savings. Unfortunately, more immediate tasks often push efficiency planning to the backburner: responding to customer requests, fixing equipment issues, capacity planning, etc. Many data center owner/operators find the idea of efficiency planning daunting: “Where do I start? How much downtime will I be incurring when implementing improvements? Are there any utility rebates that I can apply?”
To help today’s busy IT professionals, Future Resource Engineering has released a complimentary whitepaper: Creating a Data Center Efficiency Plan: Challenges & Steps to Creating an Effective and Impactful Energy Efficiency Plan. It provides a much needed blueprint for data center managers who are beginning to think of improving their energy efficiency and outlines required steps, offers solutions to common data center energy challenges, analyzes what information is relevant when determining savings, and identifies the factors to consider when determining a project’s ROI.
While every data center is unique and needs a plan customized to fit its needs, the five step planning process in the whitepaper covers issues that apply to all data centers, allowing operators to realize immediate savings to operational costs with little to no downtime:
- Potential Efficiency Opportunities
- Costs
- Savings
- Available Incentives
- Equipment Strategies
- Payback Requirements
Given the steadily increasing cost of energy, efficiency planning is a subject that data center managers can no longer afford to postpone. In California, home to Silicon Valley and the most data centers in America, experts in the state’s energy markets project that the price of electricity could jump 47% over the next 15 years, as reported in a recent story by the LA Times. At the same time, it is not uncommon to find 1 million KWh of energy savings in a single efficiency project at small to midsize data centers and that an efficiency project’s ROI can often be achieved within two years or less with careful planning and utilization of utility incentives.
There’s no time like the present to make your data center more energy efficient. As you begin the process, we encourage you to read the comprehensive whitepaper and learn about the five steps to creating an efficiency plan, which will help to ensure that you achieve the best outcome while avoiding common mistakes.
