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What are your 3 tips for building a
green data center?
Building a green data center is by
definition making it as efficient an environment as
possible. Some easy tips would include:
Virtualization
–
obviously this reduces the absolute number of physical
servers thereby reducing the power consumption of the
environment
Remove Zombie Servers
– most data
centers have one or more of these – server that have
previously hosted applications that have been shut down.
So the server goes on forever, consuming power and
producing heat, with nothing running on it.
Raise the room
temperature– Most data centers I have seen have their
cold air temperature set to between 65 degrees and 70
degrees. This can be raised a bit without any impact to
the systems operations
Aisle containment – by containing
either the hot or cold aisle, the efficiency of the
cooling environment is improved dramatically
Move the support equipment out of the
data center - The UPS Systems are a large producer of
heat. Air conditioners also produce heat. Both of these
devices are specified to run at much higher temperatures
than the IT equipment. By placing these outside of the
computer room the extra cooling to support their loads
is eliminated.
The ultimate goal of optimizing the
efficiency of the data center is to first minimize the
amount of power that is consumed by the IT equipment and
second minimize the power consumed by the power and
cooling environments to support that IT load
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