DICE: Data Intensive Computing Environment

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DICE Releases Phase 2 of Power and Cooling Study

Fewer than 1 in 3 data centers employ metrics for energy efficiency

SPRINGFIELD, OHIO (November 16, 2009) – Avetec’s HPC Research Division, the Data Intensive Computing Environment, has released Phase 2 of its study Power and Cooling Solutions for Data Centers, which surveyed administrators representing more than 170 data centers and vendors worldwide and explored the status of testing and validation related to energy efficiency, along with data centers' and their vendors' expectations for emerging technologies.

“In general, the data centers and their managements recognize the growing importance of power and cooling costs and efficiency, but few centers today are adequately prepared to measure and address this vital problem,” said Al Stutz, Chief Information Officer and DICE Principle Investigator.

The study found that most data centers lack strong mandates today to improve their energy efficiency. Fewer than one in three centers employ metrics for measuring and tracking energy efficiency. Half of the data center organizations plan to improve their measuring and tracking of energy efficiency over the next 18 months at least to some extent. In addition, the study concluded, “with few exceptions, the data centers are planning no major changes, and they do not anticipate any game-changing power and cooling technology breakthroughs in the next five years.”

 “To our knowledge, this study is the first to examine this important topic on a worldwide basis and across all major categories of data centers including high performance computing, enterprise and communications,” said Steve Conway, Research Vice President of Technical Computing, with IDC, the research firm DICE partnered with to carry out the study. “The ultimate aim is to make the findings available to data center planners and administrators, along with vendors and others who  might benefit.”

Other key findings include:

  • The largest non-technical barrier to increased energy efficiency is financial. This constraint was cited by over half of the data center administrators.
  • Fewer than 1 in 3 surveyed data centers have a formal roadmap for improving power and cooling efficiency. But most of the data centers recognized this as something important to do, and eight organizations expressed interest in helping to develop a community-wide roadmap.
  • Half of the data centers surveyed are considering distributing their resources to multiple buildings or locations.
  • Most data centers favor the idea of an independent testing and validation service. Two-thirds of data centers do not conduct in-house testing to validate energy-energy-efficiency of computing hardware.
  • Many data centers are not directly responsibility for budgeting or accounting for the cost of power. The management attitude often is “the cost of electricity is simply the cost of doing business.”

The main objective of the Power and Cooling Solutions for Data Centers study was to identify and assess approaches to data center energy efficiency being used today and planned for the future. In particular, Phase II expanded the sample population of HPC data centers to include commercial data centers as well as HPC data centers. Phase 2 included the following objectives:

  • Identify the similarities and differences between the major categories of data centers with respect to power and cooling approaches.
  • Identify the attitudes of data centers and vendors toward the importance of improved power and cooling, including energy efficiency testing and validation.
  • Identify the data centers' existing, planned and desired approaches and solutions for power and cooling.
  • Capture “pain points” and concerns about data center cooling of servers.
  • DICE, the Data Intensive Computing Environment, helps vendor and data center customers optimize technology investments and transform innovations into proven and verified products and services, thereby reducing risk and time-to-solution for High Performance Computing (HPC) and Information Technology (IT) challenges.

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