Five Cost-Saving Tips and Tricks For Your Data Center

Featured article by Tim Mullahy, General Manager at Liberty Center One

Running a data center is a costly undertaking – you want to save money wherever you can. We’ll help you do just that.

Data centers are both expensive and time-consuming to manage. It goes without saying that you want to make things as efficient as you possibly can; that you want to save time, money, and resources wherever possible. After all, the more efficient you are, the more time and energy you can dedicate to innovation.

“Companies that run their data center very efficiently actually are spending 50% more of the total IT budget on new applications, new innovation – things that really add value to the business, when compared to the customers who run their data centers inefficiently,“explained IBM VP of Site and Facilities Services Steve Sams, speaking to Data Center Dynamics “And customers with inefficient infrastructures have a number of common characteristics.”

Let’s have a look at some of those characteristics – and how you can address them to make your own facility better, faster, and stronger.

Put Effort Into Making Less Of An Effort

According to IBM, one of the biggest commonalities between inefficient data centers is that they simply don’t have data. Rather than putting in the necessary effort to monitor and automate their infrastructure – rather than actively managing their efficiency – they simply do things as they’ve always done. This leads to them spending considerably more time and effort on operations than is necessary.

If you’re looking to improve your data center, your first step is therefore to do some research on the available data center automation and monitoring tools – OpenStack, Puppet, CloudStack, and so on.

Plan For Success

According to IBM, another common trait between companies with inefficient infrastructures is a lack of planning.

“They don’t really plan,” Sams continues. “Efficient data centers are planning their expense: expense from a capital perspective and expense from an operating cost perspective. The inefficient data centers tend to focus on capital expense only.” Unfortunately, what a lot of people don’t realize is that a higher upfront cost tends to mean lower costs over time – you get what you pay for, and the more you put into making your infrastructure efficient, the lower your operational costs. Plan out your expenses with an eye for efficiency, and you might be surprised how much you save.

At any rate, we’ve gone over the two biggest, most obvious issues. Let’s wrap this post up with a few extra tips and tricks.  

Try Turning Up The Heat

Assuming you’ve not done so already, turn up your data center’s thermostat to around 80 degrees Fahrenheit. According to Google’s Bill Weihl, this is actually the ideal operating temperature of modern data center servers – something that flies in the face of traditional wisdom, which claims you should keep your facility at 68 degrees or below. If you’re feeling particularly daring, you could even try turning up the heat even higher, to 95 degrees – that’s the temperature Microsoft operates its Dublin facility at.

See, here’s the thing – turning up the heat means spending significantly less on cooling during the winter months, which in turn cuts down energy use by a pretty huge margin. Given that air conditioners are often one of the most expensive components in a data center, the potential savings from disabling them are nothing to sneeze at.

Virtualize And Consolidate

One thing I’ve noticed about poorly-managed data centers is that they often do very little in the way of managing their idle infrastructure – and they often have a lot of it, which tends to gluttonously devour electricity. I’d recommend implementing measures such as virtualization to reduce idle infrastructure, and to automatically spin down anything you’re not using.

Tech Republic (which offers a few additional tips you might want to consider) also recommends taking a close look at your hardware, and eliminating redundant equipment such as empty or half-full racks.

Encourage Cooperation

Last but certainly not least, a great many facilities suffer from a divide between IT and facility management. You need to ensure these two departments can effectively work together and communicate – otherwise, it won’t really matter how much work you put into efficient infrastructure and automation. Your data center will be bogged down by drama between personnel.

There are a few steps to preventing this from happening:

– Ensure consistency in management and monitoring tools and processes.

– Hold regular meetings that include the leadership from both teams.

– Mandate transparency – each department should know and understand what the other does, and why. Make process documents and logs available for everyone.

Closing Thoughts

Running a data center is no mean feat. You want to save time and money wherever you can. With these efficiency-saving tips, you can make your job just a little easier.

About the Author

Tim Mullahy is the General Manager at Liberty Center One. Liberty Center One is a new breed of data center located in Royal Oak, MI. Liberty can host any customer solution regardless of space, power, or networking/bandwidth requirements.