How much???
There have been countless articles about data centres/centers consuming vast amounts of power. However, ask yourself, how do you know they are all consuming the amount of power we say they are? In an industry that has always been very secretive, hidden behind various layers of security and the ubiquitous ‘Non-Disclosure Agreement’, the simple fact is….we have no idea exactly how much power data centres consume!
Whilst we well know that the facility itself does not consume much power, it is the IT within it that does. The PUE figure shows the additional load that the facility takes on top of the IT power (nothing more or less than that) A 60MW data centre with a PUE of 1.2 likely has a total facility power draw of around 72MW. The IT consumes power because you and I use the services it provides.
How much power does a data centre need?
The 60MW example above is broken down by 60MW being the total IT power draw anticipated, the additional 12MW being the facility and parasitic loads needed to support the IT. SO the data centre operator may well have contracted for 80MW of power, to be on the safe side. However, IT when sizing their request could anticipate the IT load maxing out at around 52MW and then adding in and rounding up to 60MW…to be safe. Facility management may know that they will need 10MW for the facility as a whole, but ‘to be safe’ add in a ‘comfort factor’ making it 12MW. Therefore, we have stranded 20MW of power capacity within the utility request. The utility not being like an airline, cannot over sell capacity, so 80MW is blocked out from the grid supply.
Now the facility is in operation, is it using the maximum power load? Certainly not at day 1. The load ramp profile may show that it could take a number of months or even years to reach the maximum power requirements.
Even then, how do we know how much power our facility is taking?
If you work inside the facility, you may see the utility bills, that shows the metered supply – but you are under a NDA, so the information stays internal to the organisation. Up until now data centres have not been required to state how much power they take. So up until now data centre power requirements have been a guesstimate.
Oft quoted figures regarding data centres state that in one country 7% of the generated capacity is taken by data centres, how is that figure worked out?
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(Number of data centres x approximate power draw) + (number of on-prem facilities x approximate power draw) + (enterprise facilities x approximate power draw) + rounding and a % comfort factor = total DC power – not very precise is it?
But why spoil a good story with the truth?
Because the industry has been largely unregulated up to this point and has hidden behind walls of secrecy and NDA’s legislators have sought to enact requirements, in the EU such as EED, Energy Efficiency Directive, and CSRD, Corporate Social Responsibility Directive. These require facilities of more than 500kW to report back to the EU on their energy usage amongst other things – using a standardised metric such as the ISO/EN 30134 series. Everyone reporting the same thing in the same way. Yes it may take a little while to get right. Mark Acton , one of the advisors behind much of this often says 'that it took 15years to regulate the glass blowing industry', that puts into perspective the scale of the challenge ahead of us. Just because it’s hard does that mean we should not do it?
Oh it’s ok, I’m not in the EU….
That attitude is akin to putting one head in the sand, the EU raft of legislation is being view as the ‘Gold Standard’ in many other geographies. Therefore, you can be sure that the Americas, APAC and others will also begin to enact similar laws based on what they have seen in Europe. Within the European Code of Conduct for Energy Efficiency for Data Centres there are over 150 auditable best practices for data centres and industry will be driven towards the adoption of these. John Booth MBCS, CDCAP, CDCSP will be happy to discuss this with you.
Even if you are an EU organisation operating data centres outside the EU, there is a need to comply, same as if you are based outside the EU and have data centres in the EU again you need to comply.
If you don’t comply or produce erroneous information your ability to access ‘green funding’ may also be restricted. Other measure will be enacted in the following years.
Please feel free to add in your perspective and comments below!
Data Centre Consultant, Chartered Engineer, Chartered IT Professional, Non-Exec, Standards Expert and Experienced Panel Chair
3 个月Nice article James and thanks for the mention! It gets even more murky though as the numbers sometimes used (including historically by the European Commission), represent committed power rather than consumed power - very very different numbers! Using committted power will inevitably inflate the figures massively and much of that power will never be used. I saw this happening when I was a CBRE. A report published by CBRE totalled the 'take up' of power by data centre operators in Europe over a year i.e. commitments made on provision. Absolutely nothing wrong with that number and probably reasonably accurate, however it was taken and totally misrepresented by being published in an authoritative?paper by the Commission stating it was the power being consumed by data centres in Europe - despite my protestations....
Green IT & Data Centre Energy Efficiency/Sustainability Consultant, ISO 22301/50001 Lead Auditor, ESOS Lead Assessor, Public Speaker, Former Visiting Lecturer - BCU, SDIA AB, EU-JRC Consultant EUCOC, DCS Award Winner
3 个月Great advice! and thanks for the mention, of course the best way to reduce energy is not using it in the first place, perhaps folk need to really look at the management of their ICT and not treat all applications the same, the EUCOC (unsurprisingly) has a number of best practices related to this topic, if you want to know more about the EUCOC, we'll be running some courses at the National Data Centre Academy later in the year, for more info contact us on [email protected]
General Manager, Australia, New Zealand and APAC, at Ekkosense.
3 个月Spot on discussion James on one of my favourite topics. Part of the issue has been because certain parts of the datacentre have been difficult to measure the actual power consumption. It is almost as though a datacentre was made up of many mini silos, so created by business models, power agreements, power recharges and locked rooms where only cooling and power were allowed in - true efficiency was just but a guess. This does not need to be the case anymore and more transparency is required (without giving away the secrecy) because we have ways to measure accurately now and we have an ethical responsibility to do the right thing. At a time where energy and water are becoming short in supply or the cost n unacceptable- only the power which is needed to operate the datacentre efficiently is required and the security blanket of blasting cold air “just in case” should be stopped. Many companies are seeking and are doing the right thing but we still have a way to go. Thank you for highlighting the issue James. PS Lee in case you did not view this article.
Senior Energy Engineer, Team Leader @ Huawei Technologies | MBA, BE, Energy Expert
3 个月Very informative Article