Michael Vizard at BASELINE (The Project Management Center)
Is electricity the next scarce I.T. resource?
With the price of oil forecast to stay above $50 per barrel over the next seven years, the time has come to start thinking long and hard about what impact the cost of electricity is going to have on information-technology budgets. For example, Google engineers have already warned their bosses that the cost of the electricity needed to run the company’s servers will soon be a lot greater than the actual purchase price of the server.American Power Conversion CTO Neil Rassmussen, who admittedly has a vested interest in the topic, takes it a step further by estimating that the total cost of ownership of a rack for a 10-year period ranges from $80,000 to $150,000 per rack, with electricity costs accounting for about 20% of those dollars.While most electricity costs are rising due to factors outside the control of I.T., such as burgeoning oil demand in China or natural disasters in the Gulf of Mexico, other factors at play here are within I.T.’s grasp.
The most obvious of those elements concerns the way technology shops deploy blade servers. Power consumption of these servers can run 30 kilowatts or more per rack. Typically, the units’ heat dissipation requires I.T. departments to bring in air conditioning units to cool the data center, which in turn consumes more electricity; as much as 50% of the power consumed in a data center is essentially wasted because of inefficient architectures.