Higher power and cooling costs could negate the
financial advantages of cramming more servers into datacentres
unless firms improve the monitoring of theirenergy overheads, Gartner has
warned.
Rakesh Kumar, research vice-president at the analyst firm, said
IT managers should monitor the number of
blade servers they are adding in datacentres to make sure gains
in processing power are not being offset by increases in energy and
cooling costs.
Powering and cooling account for between 4% and 7% of IT
budgets, but this is expected to double by 2012 as businesses
require more processing power per square foot from their
datacentres.
"There are no metrics to compare how much more energy efficient
one datacentre is than another, but managers need to get a stake in
the ground about how much energy consumption is rising in line with
the processing power they are adding," Kumar said.
Reducing energy costs through virtualisation and consolidating
the number of datacentres is only effective if managers can predict
by how much this will increase power and cooling costs, he
said.