I am in a conference right now on proper power management, as well as management of servers and data centers, and the main thing now that is being discussed is the high cost now of power and cooling.
There is a quote that I like which states the POWER IN EQUALS HEAT OUT. This just goes to say that the more powerful computers you have ( just like car), the more electricity it consumes ( or fuel in cars ) and the more heat ( or carbon in cars) it also produces.
Of course, the more heat it generates, the more you have to spend also to keep the people working on it to feel cool. With the emphasis now of not generating more carbon, and with oil now nearing $120 per barrel ( from about $20 5 years ago), power is now a significant cost.
And there is a reason—the latest Intel Pentium quad core processors may look small, but it generates a lot of heat – after all in that tiny chip are 820 million transistors. Just think the power, and the heat it generates. They say that an ordinary AM radio just have 8 to 15 transistors. That means a chip technically has a hundred million times more sophistication, power and of course, electricity and heat generating capacity. If you really open up a computer box, you will find that the heat sink and fan that is used to cool the processor can be ten or twenty times bigger than the chip itself!
In fact, power and cooling costs now are overtaking IT hardware purchasing in terms of expense, and this is something that people need to take a look at. If your company has a hundred computers, you may well be paying over a hundred thousand peso per month in electricity cost alone, not only in powering the computers, but also in making sure you have more air con power so that your office does not heat up.
This is a cost that is traditionally ignored. IN fact, just like people want to save and buy the cheapest computers, but get whacked in power and maintenance cost, it is also the same in servers and software. It is not unusual that people balked at buying good package software for P300,000 ( one time purchase cost), but they don’t know that hiring 5 programmers per year to make and maintain their own systems can actually cost them half a million easily per year.
I know some people who buy new cars. Why, they feel that the car was getting old, and it was costing them now tens of thousands just to repair every year. So they wanted to buy a new car, even if it costs them 1.5 million, because then, it would almost be zero maintenance. How many of these companies are bringing the same computation when they are buying computers or software?
That is why in the ICT industry, people now talk about TCO ( total cost of ownership), but nevertheless, there are still most companies not taking that into consideration.
There are now many new technologies that is solving the power and cooling issue. If you hear about thin client computing, virtualization, and blade servers – these are new technologies that is introduced to have better power management.
One last thing I learned – you should not use ordinary air conditioning equipment for your data center, but specially designed precision aircondition. Air Condition to cool computers use different technologies than those for cooling people. Precision cooling, as they call it, uses special equipment to insure that your cooling does not create humidity and moist into the power components which can corrode them – something you don’t have to consider when cooling people.