Alternating current (AC) power is ubiquitous in data centers, and it's hard to change the status quo. But a direct current (DC) power demonstration project conducted by the Lawrence Berkely National Laboratory produced some interesting results: a 7% energy savings over top-notch AC technologies.

SearchDataCenter.com recently reported on an experiment in using DC power in a data center at Syracuse University, furthering the practical research into this data center power option. While total DC power infrastructure for data centers isn't quite ready, these investigations are putting the concept on the top of mind for data center professionals concerned about power consumption.

Will DC Take to the Data Center?  DC Power could save a bundle, but tech managers are just exploring it.  

More than a century after DC bowed to AC as the most efficient method of electrical distribution, DC is getting a second look. But this time around, the ambitions of DC supporters are more narrowly focused. They're touting DC over AC as a way to make the facilities that house massive and power-ravenous data computing, storage, and communications systems more energy efficient. In a replay of the original AC-DC fight, however, AC supporters counter that tried-and-true AC, especially if it's optimized for efficiency, still reigns superior.

The battle is taking place against a backdrop of the surging "green" movement and an increased awareness of how much energy data centers use (and waste) because of how they're configured. Electrical engineering conferences, white papers, and demonstration projects that assess the comparable benefits of AC and DC for data centers have been proliferating. They've accelerated since 2006, when Congress directed the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Energy to oversee efforts to mitigate spiraling data center power consumption.

Has AC met its match?

DC has emerged as one possible fix, primarily because it would eliminate one of the biggest sources of energy loss and waste with AC - the multiple back-and-forth transformations and conditioning needed to step voltage down for use by IT equipment. By converting high-voltage AC to DC earlier, keeping it in DC form, and delivering it directly to rack-based servers, energy loss from conversion and the resultant heat that must be removed with cooling that also requires energy could be reduced. In fact, some studies peg energy savings as high as 30%.

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With industry forecasts predicting that server and data center energy consumption will nearly double from 2006 to 2011 nationally, the U.S. EPA is encouraging organizations to improve data center energy efficiency.  To help organizations meet this goal, the EPA has announced updates to the energy efficiency requirements for a variety of Energy Star qualified products and equipment for data centers.

"All Energy Star labeled data center products will come with an associated Power and Performance Datasheet (PPDS) that lists product information and detailed test results," said EPA. "Energy Star recognizes that data center products are highly complex systems that require more than just a label to understand their energy performance. All data center products will be tested according to their specific Energy Star test procedure, the results of which will be reported in a standardized format in the PPDS."

In the update, EPA announced new spec process for Uninterruptible Power Supplies (UPS), Data Center Storage, and Servers V2.0.  

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>>Top 12 Ways To Decrease Energy Consumption of Your Data Center

Emerson's LEED Data Center | Discover the strategies and technologies Emerson employed to maximize efficiency, scalability and reliability in their state-of-the-art data center.

As we roll into 2012 a quick recap of the data center related events and milestones that shaped our industry are in order. Fortunately the good people at Data Center Knowledge already compiled a very fine article “Top 10 Data Center Trends of 2011”. In addition, you should examine the excellent body of work compiled by The Green Grid in 2011 especially in the areas of sustainability (WUE, CUE, and soon materials ala MRR) and workload analysis.

If you are making a list of action items and projects to tackle in 2012, one that really must be on your list is to JOIN the Green Gird and attend the members’ forum, March 6 & 7 in San Jose, CA. Email me if you don’t find a membership level that fits your business needs so we can explore other options.

Back to 2011, perhaps some of the most significant developments are the multi-faceted approaches that organizations began to adopt and deploy in earnest towards not only data center energy efficiency but perhaps more importantly overall computational resource efficiency. With the latter, computational resource efficiency (my term), moving to the forefront as the rush to virtualization began to wane in 2011 with many organizations having hit the ‘wall’ of diminishing returns for their efforts. Not that virtualization is dead by any means, it isn’t and properly integrated to one’s DCIM (new for 2011 and rapidly gaining share of mind) deployment strategy will better enable IT and data center professionals to finally place an all-in energy, material resource, and man-hour allocation to each and every VM instance, application, storage bit, and even data I/O network traffic.

[Jack Pouchet, Emerson]

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