With rising electricity costs set to have a significant impact on the energy budgets of most organisations, many companies are looking to reduce power consumption without compromising the availability of computer, security and other business-critical systems.

It’s a target that’s being set by many companies as they ready for the promised hikes in electricity costs, says Philip Hampton, chief technology officer at Powermode, a specialist power management company.

“The key issues are how much energy can be saved and how much would it cost to realise these savings? Most importantly, how many of the changes need to be rushed into existence, and how many can be incorporated in regular technology upgrades - thus minimising capital expenditure?” says Hampton.

He says that in order to achieve a meaningful reduction in energy usage, it is necessary to adopt a broad spectrum of best practices for enhancing energy efficiency covering everything from facility lighting to cooling system design but with emphasis on Information Technology (IT) equipment optimisation.

“It’s been demonstrated that reductions in energy consumption at the IT equipment level can cascade across all supporting systems adding significantly to savings,” he says.

“Energy conservation efforts must begin with a clear understanding of IT equipment energy consumption patterns and an analysis of how energy is used within the corporate data centre.

“One of the first steps to take towards realising energy saving goals is to swap energy-inefficient processors and power supplies for high-efficiency components.”

Hampton says the typical processors in use today consume around 90 watt of electricity per hour. The latest low-power, lower voltage versions consume - on average – 30 watts-per-hour less.

“As with processors, many of the server power supplies in use today are not capable of delivering the levels of efficiency that the latest models can.

“It has been estimated that an ‘un-optimised’ data centre uses power supplies that average around 75% efficiency across a mix of servers that range from five-years old to new.

“The latest power supplies deliver efficiencies of over 90%. Use of these power supplies can reduce power consumption within the data centre by around 10 – 12%.”

Hampton notes that some power supplies perform more efficiently at partial loads than others. This is particularly important in devices with redundant power supplies where power supply usage can average less than 30%.

“Therefore it’s important to size power supplies closer to the actual load – rather than theoretical maximum load conditions that may rarely occur.

“Making these changes will help create a solid platform from which to launch other energy optimising strategies – such as the introduction of power management software.

“This should be seen as the second step in the energy conservation process and it is important for data centres that have large differences between peak and average usage rates. Power management can save between 8 and 10% of an un-optimised data centre load,” he says.

Another feature of the strategy should be server virtualisation. This is a technology which can play a vital role in optimising the data centre for efficiency, performance and manageability.

“Virtualisation is able to make a single server appear to function as multiple logical servers. It therefore represents a significant step towards reducing the amount of hardware in the date centre – and also within the corporate infrastructure - and consequently the power usage of these devices.

“Implementing virtualisation technologies can provide an incremental 8 to 10% reduction in total power consumption for a facility in which only 25% of its servers are virtualised,” he adds.