Not just global warming but also higher costs for corporations. A recent report by McKinsey & Co. suggests that data centers are grossly under used leading to tremendous wastage of energy on a global scale and causing major cost inefficiencies at the corporation level. With one of the companies which they studied, they observed that a third of their 500 servers had utilization rates below 3%; and about 2/3rds had utilization rate below 10%. Wow, what a waste of power. If not for global warming, then atleast to pare their costs, companies need to work out processes to better manage their data center capacities.
McKinsey’s research brings up interesting findings like, almost every company can double its data center energy efficiency through better, cohesive data center management, better planning, and increased accountability. And this will lead to more efficient energy usage, cutting down in terms of both capital investments for setting up or expanding a datacenter (including expensive real estate) and recurring costs, and, a good level of reduction in CO2 emissions! Plenty of incentives to do what is necessary. And indeed I can’t help saying that common sense isn’t so common after all. While it would seem to be common sense to expand capacity only when the current set up is fully utilized, it appears that companies end up spending billions more than necessary because of poor management.
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