Power struggle: How IT managers cope with the data center power demands

Computerworld - When Tom Roberts oversaw the construction of a 9,000-square-foot data center for Trinity Health, a group of 44 hospitals, he thought the infrastructure would last four or five years. A little more than three years later, he's looking at adding another 3,000 square feet and re-engineering some of the existing space to accommodate rapidly changing power and cooling needs.

Image Credit: Belle Mellor

As in many organizations, Trinity Health's data center faces pressures from two directions. Growth in the business and a trend toward automating more processes as server prices continue to drop have stoked the demand for more servers. Roberts says that as those servers continue to get smaller and more powerful, he can get up to eight times more units in the same space. But the power density of those servers has exploded.

"The equipment just keeps chewing up more and more watts per square foot," says Roberts, director of data center services at Novi, Mich.-based Trinity. That has resulted in challenges meeting power-delivery and cooling needs and has forced some retrofitting.

"It's not just a build-out of space but of the electrical and the HVAC systems that need to cool these very dense pieces of equipment that we can now put in a single rack," Roberts says.

Power-related issues are already a top concern in the largest data centers, says Jerry Murphy, an analyst at Robert Frances Group Inc. in Westport, Conn. In a study his firm conducted in January, 41% of the 50 Fortune 500 IT executives it surveyed identified power and cooling as problems in their data centers, he says.

Murphy also recently visited CIOs at six of the nation's largest financial services companies. "Every single one of them said their No. 1 problem was power," he says. While only the largest data centers experienced significant problems in 2005, Murphy expects more data centers to feel the pain this year as administrators continue to replenish older equipment with newer units that have higher power densities.

In large, multimegawatt data centers, where annual power bills can easily exceed $1 million, more-efficient designs can significantly cut costs. In many data centers, electricity now represents as much as half of operating expenses, says Peter Gross, CEO of EYP Mission Critical Facilities Inc., a New York-based data center designer. Increased efficiency has another benefit: In new designs, more-efficient equipment reduces capital costs by allowing the data center to lower its investment in cooling capacity.