Why CIOs Should See Their Power Bills

Why CIOs Should See Their Power Bills - Forbes.com

Robin Johnson, 09.10.10, 06:00 AM EDT
The planet pays when CIOs aren't aware of information technology's energy cost.

ROUND ROCK, TEXAS -- The obvious first step for reducing any organization's energy use is to measure it and find ways to lower it. So why is it that the overwhelming majority of CIOs--owners of their companies' information technology infrastructure and consumers of huge amounts of energy--never see a power bill?

As ludicrous as that sounds, it's quite common. The power bill goes to the facilities team. It's particularly unfortunate when you consider that at a large company, technology can consume as much as 40% or more of the power used.

Thankfully it's a problem that's easy and affordable to begin to tackle. Connecting the IT and facilities departments in any organization, from businesses to governments, can slash power usage and increase efficiency with something as simple as using a few electric meters. In Dell's ( DELL - news - people ) case, we managed to add 35% more computing capacity without using one additional watt.

Once the CIO knows how much power all those machines and their related cooling systems are consuming, it's hard not to find ways to be more efficient. For example, a server in one location is running a particular software program, has plenty of unused capacity and is burning electricity. Across the room, there's another server doing the very same thing. Introduce virtualization software, which lets one machine do the work of many, and you're immediately saving power and money while minimizing the environmental impact.

Now imagine a data center filled with server racks. They take cool air in through the front and blow hot air out the back. In an organization in which the CIO doesn't see a power bill, the data center isn't necessarily arranged for energy efficiency.

You might have two server racks facing front-to-back, mixing hot and cold air and lowering the efficiency of the cooling process. In fact, most data centers are run far too cold--10 or 15 degrees cooler than necessary--just to keep a few hot spots from overheating. By rearranging your data center to keep the hot air hot and the cold air cold, you can reduce power bills and improve system efficiencies by 20% or more.

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