Can Data Centers be designed to waste less energy?

I always wondered why the cooling mechanisms that are currently in use in most data centers want to drop the temperature to levels you can start using your data center as a fridge. I've seen reports (years ago) that raising the temp 5 or 10 degrees Celcius isn't even a bad thing for equipment at all, but it saves a ton in energy costs!

What I find most interesting about this energy issue is that I read about tons of businesses who move everything to the Cloud to save on their own energy costs, but don't think about how they're simply passing the energy consumption bills along to the data centers.

If you're interested, Google has up on its blog a virtual tour of the new data center: http://googleblog.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/googles-data-centers-inside-look.html

Interesting read Kate, thanks!

I still get the chills when I recall a customer I've been at a couple of years ago. We were implementing a new VMware & storage environment which meant installing lots of equipment in the datacenter. After that was done we had to virtualize the old servers: boot them up from CD and image them over to VMware; something that had to be done at the keyboard and thus in the datacenter.

Usually that wasn't so much a problem, except that this customer preferred its cold aisle to be at roughly 14 deg C (which is a little under 60-ish deg F). With the chiller outlet EXACTLY in front of the rack we were standing. Yikes that was cold... we used to start the copy or some other process, then huddle behind the rack to heat up a bit!

I think there are different aspects of this increase in energy efficiency and the one that I can focus on is minimizing the power draw and heat generation in the data center that our facilities team have to deal with.

We were leery of performance with Pool based virtualization and FAST on our arrays, but after starting out very carefully we have found that we can go much heavier on the lower performance/higher capacity drives than we ever though possible and the applications STILL get more performance (or at least as much as they need) than they were getting.

I know that this wasn't the direct intent of this thread, but sometimes making things more efficient needs to start even earlier in the process. In this case, instead of thinking first about how to cool more efficiently and provide power more cleanly, let's look at how to reduce the NEED for power and cooling.

I know that this wasn't the direct intent of this thread, but sometimes making things more efficient needs to start even earlier in the process. In this case, instead of thinking first about how to cool more efficiently and provide power more cleanly, let's look at how to reduce the NEED for power and cooling.

Agreed: let's declare every Friday a powerless Friday! So switch off all your electrical swag on the last day before the weekend starts and get up to 17% energy savings in return! Waaaw!

Allen, the intent of the thread was actually to talk about energy efficiency, using the Google data center as an example. So you're not off topic.

Can you describe how you implemented your plan to increase performance in your drives?