Bright Hub (BH): What was your role in the Environmental Protection Agency's Report to Congress on Server and Data Center Energy Efficiency?
Jonathan Koomey: I was an advisor to the technical team at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory who produced the EPA report to Congress. They used my spreadsheets characterizing server electricity use as the basis for their calculations for servers -- they added networking and storage electricity use and included detailed scenarios.
BH: Being a pro with numbers, can you provide an analogy of how much energy data centers power?
Jonathan Koomey: In 2005, data centers worldwide used almost as much electricity as Mexico, a country of more than 100 million people.
BH: How can IT managers make the case to executives for upgrading data center equipment and related investments?
Jonathan Koomey: The easiest time to make the case is when a data center runs out of capacity. Efficiency can extend the useful life of an existing facility. If IT managers analyze the TOTAL COST (including energy use for cooling and infrastructure equipment, as well as avoided capital expenditures for such equipment) then efficiency becomes a complete no-brainer.
But they will need to fight to change the institutional structure of their data center operation so that minimizing total costs becomes the goal, not just costs to particular departments with separate budgets.
The EPA report to Congress contains estimates of how much electricity efficiency can save and what technologies can help data centers accomplish this. Also check out:
http://datacenters.lbl.gov,
http://www.uptimeinstitute.org
http://thegreengrid.org
BH: What has changed -- if anything -- since the study came out?
Jonathan Koomey: The industry is definitely focusing on issues of efficiency more clearly now, but we have a long way to go.
About Jonathan Koomey
Consulting Professor at Stanford University. Dr. Koomey is one of the leading international experts on electricity used by computers, office equipment, and data centers, and is the author or co-author of eight books and more than one hundred and fifty articles and reports on energy and environmental economics, technology, forecasting, and policy. He has also published extensively on critical thinking skills. He holds M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the Energy and Resources Group at the University of California at Berkeley, and an A.B. in History of Science from Harvard University. His latest solo book is Turning Numbers into Knowledge: Mastering the Art of Problem Solving <http://www.analyticspress.com>, now out in its second edition (April 2008). For more biographical details and a complete publications list, go to <http://www.koomey.com>.