Data Center Efficiency Metering and Chargeback is good, but not Green.
June 9, 2008CRG West announced that it is moving to an energy use charge-back mechanism for its customers through the use of Branch Circuit Monitoring (BCM). The power pricing model will be based on actual usage of energy by its customers in seven of its ten data center locations. While Branch Circuit Monitoring is not a new technology and by data centers is relatively cheap to install there has been a huge resistance to its installation across data centers. The challenge has typically been with management’s view of this technology’s value in operations. As Dave O’Hara mentions in his blog, some users actually uninstall this technology rather than deal with charge-back mechanisms. Branch Circuit Monitoring is such a key technology not just for Charge-back, but also understanding your actual energy consumption, trending, and metering its hard to come up with a case why ITS NOT valuable. I am not sure I buy the “Green” angle associated with the article mention on the GreenM3 blog or at Data Center Knowledge. To me this is slightly “green-washed” as all it really does is call to action system shut off if you aren’t using it. I guess I should get used to this kind of thing being called “Green” versus “Good Operational Practices”.
Power usage based billing tied with a power inventory management solution adds additional “green” benefits to data centres.
Obviously power based billing will allocate costs fairly, and provides an economic incentive for clients to reduce energy consumption.
Moving from a “space” based billing model to a “power” based approach leads to greater “green” benefits, as space may be allocated more efficiently against cooling capacity. By limiting power usage per rack, cooling may be delivered more efficiently, reducing cooling power consumption, and preventing “hot spots”.
The additional “green” benefit is the ability to maximize efficiencies between power capacity (inventory) against site infrastructure. A common mistake of data centres that do not adopt an inventory management system (or proper power monitoring solution), is to prematurely upgrade back end infrastructure ie cooling. Not only does this result in needless capital expenditures, it uses an excess amount of power.
Power based billing is an important component of a”green”data centre.