In the world interwoven with the information networks, which depend on reliable and high density data stores, the energy efficiency, converted into a production of carbon dioxide per unit surface of the data centre, is nowadays a hot talking point by all current and under construction data centres.

This can be solved in various ways. It ranges from traditional ways based on an improvement of HW efficiency over some less traditional such as intermittent duty of the server, to absolutely unconventional ways such as placing the data centre underground.

Hot, everywhere you look
Firstly, let's talk about what creates in fact the dominant part of the electric energy consumption per run of the data centre. It's by far not just the direct consumption for a server supply. This consumption increases with the rising stroke of the processor. Nowadays you can "give" to the same place even a double electric input unlike two or three years ago.
There aren't seemingly many saving possibilities during keeping or rather instant growth of power - but the producers of the processors fortunately already feel the need of reacting and they let their products "turn green". As an example we can mention series of Intel processors in the program Energy-Efficient Performance for Dual Core processors and also AMD processors in the program Maximize Performance-Per-Watt for Opteron processors and higher.
By the year 2010 Intel wants within the scope of "Intel and the Climate Savers Computing Initiative" to reduce the CO2 production, which is produced directly further to computer running, to equivalent of 54 million tons annually worldwide, which represents for comparison an annual amount of emission exhaust fumes of 11 million cars or of 15 common coal-fired power stations.
It is worth mentioning that a research on waste heat recovery from the processors of the computers to backward power production, which is based on the thermionic radiation principle, is already in progress - but it is the topic for a self-contained article.

Practically the same quantity of electric energy is consumed by the server running itself as well as by its cooling. And here becomes the situation more interesting. This part rests seemingly on telehouse operator's shoulders. But it isn't so. Even here can a user / a customer influence a lot. The server generates heat liberation rate and it must be cooled even in time when it "does nothing", runs free. It can be put to use quite easily - by shutting off of the server (disc arrays, graphic cards and other computer components) in time, when they are not needed. It is seemingly a crazy idea, however, if we take a deeper think it is brilliantly plain, cheep and mainly effective! Why for example let running both front-end servers in time of minimal run? Why don't shut down the servers with backup discs array in time, when no transactions are coming? Some data centre operators try to introduce this model - so far we have reports from USA and Asia. This tendency hasn't come to indolent and fastidious Europe in greater scale yet.

Renewable resources? As the case may be.
Then there exists in the scope of "greening" of the data centres a possibility of getting at least a part of the energy for the server operation from renewable resources. There aren't many possibilities. Wind utilization may not be in the high-density city housing an optimal way. What could work is putting the solar cells on the roof of the telehouse. However, this also encounters a climate problem. Telehouses are mostly situated in the cities, where the efficiency of the solar cells is poorer in consequence of smog pollution then in the areas more suitable for it. In our conditions the output of the installed cell is in south Moravia per year more than 30. It isn't absolutely a small project, the operators plan placing an equivalent up to 30 000 processor units placed in so-called blackbox. It should be maintenance-free sealed up containers carrying 250 servers each, lowered down to the depth of about 100 metres. With the total costs of 405 million USD the annual savings should be about 9 million USD.

So in our conditions the most feasible and very good affordable still for the present stays virtualization. So it means the purchase of computing power at the shared HW with a support of an energy saving program. The examples of this solution present also the programs such as Virtual Private Server or Webhotel from COOLHOUSING.NET Company, which run on the Intel processors with the support of energy saving Energy-Efficient Performance and where are the parts thanks to the debugged core used only as much as it is just in the given moment needed.

Finally, let's mention also seemingly absolutely trivial, however, the most underestimated factor of power consumption saving, which is the choice of the source in relation to its efficiency. With the right source we can manage lower transformation of energy to heat and so the higher efficiency and also decrease in power consumption for the same computing power. The company COOLHOUSING.NET evaluated the sources on the basis of tests and stated as a good choice the sources from the company Fortron, which show really good results. Even though the price of the hardware, which is in terms of efficiency "ecological", is still unfortunately high, the present trend of increasing prizes for energy indicates that in the end everybody would have to follow the way of higher energy efficiency.

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This article hax ben writed by Ing. Karel Umlauf. He is a director of Server Hosting COOLHOUSING.NET. This companny offer a dedizierte server and virtual root servers