KITS Makes Case for Energy Efficient Data Centre

Taofeek Okoya, director, Business and strategy, KITS Technologies has flaunted the economic gains that Data Centre Operators across Nigeria and west Africa stands to benefit if energy efficiency is adopted in their initial design concept or in their day-to-day best practice operational management.

He said that since following best practices cost nothing and once the ‘require skill’ is at hand cost can be reduced.

According to him, Data Centre experts worldwide had observed that millions of servers are being run, managed and upgraded without being actively used on a daily basis.

These unused servers, he said consumes hundreds of millions of dollars (running and energy consumption cost). In addition, up to $21.4 billion is wasted each year on hardware, maintenance, management, energy and cooling for unused servers in data Centres.
 
He added that, KITS Technologies, in one of her efforts to address the challenges, would be hosting a professional training in Lagos, and working in conjunction with Capitoline LLP of UK, to demonstrate the best practices in achieving an Energy Efficient Data Centre.

The training is targeted at all professionals involved in the Planning, Designs, Specifications and Operational Management of Data Centres.

The five days intensive training is scheduled to commence today.

In a similar vein, Neil Rasmussen, founder and chief technical officer of American Power Conversion, said that electricity usage costs have become an increasing fraction of the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) for data centers.

It is possible to dramatically reduce the electrical consumption of typical data centers through appropriate design of the network-critical physical infrastructure and through the design of the IT architecture; that Simple ‘no-cost’ decisions made in the design of a new data center can result in savings of 20- 50% of the electrical bill, and with systematic effort up to 90% of the electrical bill can be avoided.

Conclusively, he said managing energy actively results in 40 percent or more energy savings in the data center; that When you consider that a data center can consume 10 to 100 times more energy per square foot than the average office building, and in some cases up to 40 percent of an organization’s carbon footprint, it is clear that managing energy in the data center is of paramount importance.