Last year, the Environmental Protection Agency, in its Report to Congress on Server and Data Center Energy Efficiency, stated, “Objective, credible information is needed about the performance of new technologies and about best practices as well as the effect of both on data center availability.” To produce such information, Accenture set up a Data Center Demonstration Project for which it recruited several large companies to try out the latest energy-saving equipment and methods in their data centers. Participants – including Sun Microsystems, Oracle, Yahoo, NetApp, Symantec, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Digital Realty Trust, NetApp, Oracle, Synopsys and the U.S. Postal Service -- have all reaped significant improvements in energy use and overall efficiency through their experimentation. Sun, for example, tested a server-consolidation approach. The company moved to high-performance, energy-efficient servers and storage systems and reclaimed 88% of its data center floor space, reduced power consumption by over 60% and avoided more than $9 million in construction costs. Synopsys, a semiconductor chip design software company, achieved energy savings through performance modeling and job scheduling. It improved server utilization, increased storage capacity, and put off a purchase of 1,000 more nodes for five years. Many of the approaches tested in the project generated a return on investment in about eighteen months.

“The most striking result of the study is you can take a legacy data center and make it nearly as efficient as a newly built facility,” says Wally Phelps, product line marketing manager at AdaptivCool, a company that provides data center cooling advice. “At one site where they’ve done air flow management, raised the chill set points and put in water side economizers [a way of taking advantage of cool outdoor temperatures], they had the same efficiency numbers as a new data center.” For a 20-30 year old data center, this may not be possible, but for data centers built within the last 10 years there’s hope. “We’ve found that because air flow isn’t really taught to data center managers, you can reap a lot of efficiency through incremental improvements in air flow,” Phelps says.

The most innovative energy efficiency effort Phelps has seen lately is server power management -- shutting off servers when they aren’t in use. “A lot of Wall Street firms have certain hours of the day when they’re not using the equipment, so they can save a lot of energy there,” he says. One thing to be aware of, he notes, is that when you turn off servers, you have to match cooling capacity. “If you shut off half the servers in your room, you’ve got to shut off half the cooling in the room,” he says. “If you don’t do that, you’re going to cause condensation in the data center.”