Fundamental Ways to Reduce

Data Center OPEX Costs

Melvyn Wray
SVP of Product Marketing

What are data center OPEX costs

Electricity costs
Licence costs
Maintenance costs
Labour costs

Obvious electricity cost savings

Virtualization
Power efficiency
Air conditioning efficiency

Virtualization
Reduces overall power consumption
With a high performance server consuming ~1kW,
the power savings are large

Each server consumes ~800 of electricity per annum

(based on 10p per kW)

Power efficiency
Select data center equipment with the highest power efficiency

Choose 90% over 80% efficiency

Inefficiency produces noise and heat
Heat requires air conditioning

Air conditioning
Highly efficient air conditioning typically has an Energy Efficiency Ratio
(ERR) of 10
ERR = cooling energy (Btu/hr) / power consumption (W)
Effectively, 25% additional energy is needed for cooling

Air conditioning
Recommendations are to keep ambient temperatures between
20~24oC

To reduce costs set temperature and run at 24oC rather than 20oC
Layout of the equipment, to allow better
airflow will reduce hot spots

Rack layout non force air cooled

More localized heat

Less localized heat

Switch

Switch

Licensing costs
25% saving on Microsoft Server Licences with Enterprise Licence

Four Virtual Server Licences for the price of three Standard

Licences

>25% savings with Data Center Licences when deploying over eight
virtual machines

Maintenance costs
Without virtualization, each server hosts an application

Hardware availability is critical

Maintenance contracts mandatory

With virtualization, multiple servers host multiple applications

Hardware may fail, with minimal impact

Lower costs maintenance can be considered

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Labour costs
With critical hardware, IT support labour costs are higher

More experienced staff to deal with emergencies

More cover to deal with out of hours emergencies

With virtualization, critical issues are reduced

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Hidden potential cost savings

Networking equipment

Electricity costs
Heat generation and dissipation

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Power consumption
Not all switches are created equal

Power consumption across manufacturers ranges by over 200%

Data centers require throughput so Layer 2 is ideal

Layer 3 switches are more complex, consume more power, and

are more expensive

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Power supply efficiency

Inefficient power supplies generate more direct heat.

Select power supplies with high efficiencies (>80%)

More heat means more money spent heating and then cooling the
air with air-conditioning

The difference for a 100W power supply being 70% or 90% efficient in
a switch equates to >20 p.a.

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Short cable lengths

Green Ethernet

Switches automatically detect copper cable lengths, and reduce

transmitted power accordingly

IEEE standard Energy Efficient Ethernet

In periods of low traffic utilization, the ports are put into a low
energy idle mode

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Energy Efficient Ethernet

One Lawrence Berkeley Labs researcher estimated the IEEE effort
alone could save $450 million in energy costs a year just in the U.S.,
$80 million just from data centers

The researcher estimated that a Gigabit interface card could shave up

to 1.5W off its power consumption and a 10Gbit card up to 10W by
scaling back data rates at times of low traffic

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Inter-connections

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Different inter-connects vary largely in cost, but also in power

Connection

Speed

Power (Max.)

SFP multi-mode

1G

1W

SFP copper

1G

1.3W

XFP multi-mode

10G

1.4W

SPF+ multi-mode

10G

1W

SFP+ copper (Twinax)

10G

1W

CX4 copper

10G

4W

Turn off the lights!!

Many data center or server rooms are kept locked and may not have
any humans enter for days at a time
Turn off the lights to save cost
Also helps reduce heat

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Eco-friendly switches
Allied Telesis eco-friendly switches can also turn off their LED
indicators
Manual (via front panel button)
Auto, after 15 minutes after pressing the button

Helps save up to 3% of power as it reduces the load on the power

supply

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Remove the fans

For non forced-air systems, some Allied Telesis switches are now so
low power that they are fanless
More reliable no moving parts
Less power consumption no fan to drive

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Out of hours operation

Do you need to run all the services 24/7?

Weekends
Bank holiday
10pm ~ 5am

Consider powering down (idle) non-essential items to save power

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Power down servers

With virtualized applications being hosted on multiple hardware hosts,
some hosts can be powered off
Issue is powering them back on!
Software and hardware dependent
One solution is intelligent power strips

Can power on/off servers via IP over the network

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Power down/off - out of hours

VoIP phone systems

Legally you have to have some phones that can connect to the
outside world for emergencies
Other phones can be powered off as they are powered via
Power-over-Ethernet; this is energy from and heat generated in
the server room
Simple configuration scripts can power down individual named
ports

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Power down/off - out of hours

Wireless access points

If no one is present in the building there is no need for a wireless

network
Uses Power-over-Ethernet technology, so the connected switch
can be programmed

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Summary
Allied Telesis provides Network Infrastructure equipment for use in
Data Centers, which can help reduce both the OPEX, and help
increase reliability.

For more information please visit www.alliedtelesis.com

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Thank you for your time