Fight Green Fatigue With Numbers

I’ve had some responses to my query a couple of weeks ago: has Green Fatigue set in?.

Green Fatigue is when your efforts to improve your data centre’s efficiency give you less and less payback, until you eventually give up on the whole idea of saving more energy.

Tired of hearing about it?

It’s an obvious possibility. Your first steps in cutting waste can be comparatively easy. There are obvious ways in which energy is wasted (for instance, your chillers are cooling the whole building, not just the IT kit) and tehre are straightforward ways to improve it (contain the hot aisle)

After that, each step becomes more costly, and delivers less benefit.

I rather simplistically suggested that once you’ve got as efficient as you can reasonably expect to get, you might as well shift all your IT into the cloud, where the Internet giants have the economy of scale to improve on it further.

Since then, I’ve heard from a couple of people who say there’s plenty more to do in the data centre, and it’s way too early to throw in the towel.

I’ve also heard, just like everyone else, about the likelihood of Internet giants like Google sharing your corporate data with governments. Which maybe should give us some pause on the whole idea of shifting to the cloud en masse.

So let’s look closely at the prospects for keeping our own IT, and making it efficient enough so the power bills don’t drive us all out of business.

Cutting by a fifth

Colt sent me some positive figures. The company claims to have cut its power bill by nearly a fifth over three years, and gave a small amount of detail about how it traversed the curve of diminishing returns.

It set itself the task of reducing the power used by the data centres it runs for itself and its customers, and in the first year, it cut ten percent. It took two years for the next phase, which took another eight percent off the power bill.

Colt hasn’t set out in detail what technologies it applied in each phase, though the press release hints that the first phase was about containing airflow, and the second phase addressed data centre kit such as chillers and UPS systems.

It also hasn’t said whether any of the cuts came through IT changes. Were any of the savings gained through consolidating servers (or even data centres) out of existence?

And what about the level of business? Is Colt actually running the same amount of IT at the end of the three years? Say Colt or its customers cut their IT needs, or some of its customers went out of business or moved elsewhere. That would cut the power bill, wouldn’t it?

I’m sure none of that got cooked into Colt’s figures, but I plan to sit down with Colt to get more details, if the company’s happy to talk further.

It seems someone knows how to beat Green Fatigue, and I want to know the details.

A version of this article appeared on Green Datacenter News.

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