Data Center Efficiency & Risk Analysis
The strategy involved in strategic planning is making tough decisions about what is most important to achieving success within an organization. Whether that decision is about facilities, growth, technology, or organizational structure it is important to involve an experienced and knowledgeable professional to guide you along the decision making process.
Energy Efficiency Reduces Operational Costs
Many data centers waste vast amounts of energy due to poor airflow design, over cooling, insufficient server consolidation and retirement, and lack of environmental measurement and energy consumption benchmarking. By utilizing data center best practices such as hot aisle / cold aisle, cold aisle containment, air-side economizers, virtualization, consolidation, and data center zones; data center managers can help their organization greatly reduce their operational costs.
Data Center Services
Identify Vulnerabilities and Cost Saving Initiatives
Data Center Assessment identifies and exposes risks of vulnerabilities and inefficient expenses that have surfaced – and grown – over time within the IT environment and facility infrastructure. Aserdiv provides expert services to identify strengths and weaknesses which affect these risks and overall operational expenses while providing suggestive recommendations for resolving these areas. Top concerns that Aserdiv experts evaluate include:
- Hot Spots: Determine causes and how to reduce / eliminate
- Existing Amenities: Evaluate available amenities to support the environments and the value it adds to the facility
- Risk: Identify and rank potential risk events expected over a period of time
- Environmental Efficiency: Power, heat removal, airflow and floor space
- Inventory Records: Critical infrastructure equipment and rack based equipment
Customized Data Center Assessment
Aserdiv focuses on tailoring assessments to meet the unique concerns of each client. Utilizing these services will yield confident data center decisions, provide detailed data center and site specifics, and ultimately produce a comprehensive plan for building, maintaining, or renovating your data center.
Suggestive areas which Aserdiv targets when evaluating a Data Centers efficiency:
- Data Center Design, Layout and Diagrams
- Conditioned Air Delivery and Capacity
- Cabling Infrastructure
- Power and Battery Back-up Infrastructure
- Computing and Network Infrastructure
- Thermal Modeling (CFD Analysis)
- Environmental Monitoring Systems
- Security and Fire Suppression Systems
- Remote Management
Data Center Reliability Scorecard
This scorecard provides feedback on an organizations potential Data Center efficiency. Issues and goals are identified for each section for the report to focus on the overall concepts of the Data Center Assessment. Each section evaluated is included within a table which includes the section description, the health status for the section, and recommendations regarding the organizations data center. The red / yellow / green health status provides a quick visual pointer to key areas that may require further study and evaluation.
ROI: Maximize Uptime and Eliminate Risk
Not only is it possible to gain a rapid ROI from laying the foundation for an efficient data center, but in the context of today's challenging economic climate, doing so is mission-critical. More than 60 percent of the power used to cool equipment in the data center is completely wasted. Data centers that used to cost $10 million, now cost $100 million. Save money in the future by developing an efficient infrastructure for your organization today.
- Cooling:
Proper cooling system can result in 40% savings in monthly energy costs - Remote Management:
Workflow set-up and management can result in 33% reduction in server maintenance - Power:
Reduce energy costs by 80% without affecting applications or users - Hardware:
Increase utilization from 10-15% up to 80% - Server Consolidation:
Reduce hardware and operating costs by as much as 50% - Overall Infrastructure Efficiency:
Raise data center infrastructure efficiency to 70%
Benchmarking Data Center Efficiency
Nothing makes an argument more compelling than the cold, hard facts. There is also no better way to motivate an organization toward increased data center power efficiency than with accurate, aggregated energy - consumption data. Solid data does more than convince an organization that efficiency can cut expenses -- a baseline measurement gives a starting place and point of comparison for data center efficiency improvements.
Putting together a plan based on a benchmark of performance metric and a list of opportunities for improvement is essential. Major power reductions can be achieved by utilizing cooling best practices, removing or consolidating under-utilized servers, understanding the total life cycle energy cost of any new IT equipment and utilizing the most energy efficient equipment where ever possible.
PUE and DCiE - You can't control or manage what you don't measure
PUE and its reciprocal DCiE are now widely accepted energy measurement standards that were proposed by the Green Grid to help computer room and data center managers to determine how energy efficient their data centers are. Data centers are estimated to contribute 3% of the CO2 emissions globally, yet the vast majority of data center managers have no idea how much energy their facility consumes -- let alone where to start making savings.
PUE = Power Usage Effectiveness
DCiE = Data Center infrastructure Efficiency
PUE / DCiE determines the amount of energy used in the data center to power IT equipment, infrastructure, and cooling equipment used to dissipate the heat generated from IT equipment. As PUE and DCiE have become widely accepted standards, running this calculation will allow organizations to compare how energy efficient their facility is to other data centers across the country as well as globally. It also gives a base point to gauge how effective power efficiency efforts are progressing.