Managed hosting provider
Ultraspeed is reducing
its
datacentre power consumption by 40% with a green initiative
that combines direct current (DC) power with discless
servers.
"Alternating current (AC) power is used in virtually all UK
datacentres, but DC power is almost 20% more efficient," said
Jordan Gross, commercial director at Ultraspeed.
By using DC power, 20% to 40% of the thermal load is shifted
outside the server to the AC-DC converters. This increases server
reliability by as much as 27%, allows for higher density server
environments and reduces power consumption.
According to Gross, many
datacentres in London are facing power shortages, with modern
servers drawing three times as much power as they did in the
1990s.
"We as an industry need to become more conscious of our power
consumption and create sustainable datacentres. Reducing
consumption directly is better than some unverifiable carbon
offsetting scheme that is open to abuse," he said.
Switching to DC power enabled Ultraspeed to reduce its
datacentre power consumption by 30%. The extra 10% saving was
achieved by developing servers that run without a hard drive and
use low energy processors.
"Discless servers generate less heat, and therefore less power
is needed to cool them," said Gross. In an AC environment, for
every 100W used to power a server, an additional 60W to 70W is
needed for cooling.
Ultraspeed created its discless servers by putting the operating
system and data on a remote storage area network. "This is not only
more energy efficient, but has also brought hardware replacement
times down to 15 minutes in the event of a failure," said
Gross.
Makers of DC powered servers have reported power savings of up
to 65% in datacentres using low power processors.
Analyst firm IDC said it believed using DC power in the
datacentre could cut costs and improve the reliability of critical
IT environments.
Power your datacentre for less >>
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