Data Center Efficiency:What about Customer Support?

There are a lot of definitions of efficiency, but I think my personal favorite is,” the ratio of output to input in any system.” If what you get is close to the amount of what you put in its efficient.

Energy efficiency is therefore the ratio between the amount of work produced and the amount of energy needed. When it comes to data centers there are a few extra incentives.

The most obvious is power is money. Not only does power cost, but the cost of power is rising and has been doing so for years. I remember an interview I did was Superb Hosting’s CEO Haralds Jass. This was a while ago, early 2000s I believe and back then he said the biggest problem will be power… and he was right.

The second incentive may not be obvious but it is self-evident to those who operate large amounts of IT equipment; the need to produce more work is also escalating.

I already have an article in the works for WebHostMagazine.com on the best practices of energy reduction.. and its quite lengthy; I have been meaning to make it smaller but I just don’t have it in me… so I won’t go over that here. But there is one thing I want to talk about that I only seen 1 other writer talk about (A great piece of work by Lex Coors at DataCenter Journal entitled Data Center Efficiency – It’s in the Design) and that is customer support.

I am going to take customer support a little further however. Virtualization is a great technology to have, but what happens when you have to deal with dedicated server customers? They are not necessarily going to want to share their server with others and although some may have multiple websites on their server, they may not be open to the idea of virtualization the server up (they might think its too much of a hassle, etc). One of the main problems with energy use is under use by servers. Four idling servers are using up power that could probably be better served doing something else. A web server that only serves one site running, on average, three hours of intense resource use then goes to something like 20% system resources the other 21 hours is a waste.

Packet Power mentioned charging for power like you would bandwidth. A good idea but it too is missing something; the customer service end. If you want to fully realize not just less power waste and still have happy customers, I think power should be a sellable metric and I think this opens up the way for power usage consulting. Technical support teams will have to learn how to implement best practices for power usage and servers and, more importantly, pass this on to the user. Now you might say, if I am charging my customers for power, would I not want them to use as much as possible? True you might want to do that but remember that you may not be charging them for all the power their system uses. For instance you probably won’t be able to figure out exactly how much power it costs to cool that one server or the total power loss from the central power bay to the server. Also you can gain more money or good pr by offering your customers a means to talk to technicians who can squeeze high performance yields out of every ounce of energy.

When it comes to the best practices in saving power, in the Web Host industry, it is not about making sure your house is in order… its about making sure your house and your customer’s is in order.