Cutting power bill isn’t best result of data center efficiency

It might seem illogical, but the best savings from being efficient in your data center can’t necessarily be seen on the power bill.

That was one of the main points Ken Brill, founder and executive director of The Uptime Institute, hammered home in his presentation at Data Center Decisions last week. His keynote, entitled “Revolutionizing Data Center Efficiency,” tied everything back to the most important thing: the almighty dollar.

So where does the big savings come from? It comes from being able to hold off on building a new, expensive data center, the price tag on which can easily exceed $100 million if you’re talking about a big facility.

The longer you can stretch your data center’s resources — and that includes space, power and cooling capacity — the longer you’ll be able to hold off on buying a new facility. That is something the United Parcel Service discovered when designing its Tier 4-rated data center in Alpharetta, Ga.

Joe Parrino, the data center manager there, said as much earlier this year:

United Parcel Service also equates energy efficiency with increasing the useful service life of the data center. “All these data centers around the country are running out of power and cooing and are having to expand,” Parrino said. “Becoming energy efficient is a great payback when you don’t have to expand into additional infrastructure.”