Colocation power costs (the cost of power in an outsource data center facility) can make a big difference in your overall IT budget. The raw cost of power varies throughout the country. Midwest colocation provider Lifeline Data Centers pays Indianapolis Power and Light $.055 per kW/hr. East and west coast colocation facilities pay double that cost of power.

But more importantly, how does the outsource data center pricing model charge you for power? The fairest way would be to charge based on actual usage. At Lifeline, we charge $.175 per kW/hr based on actual power draw. $.055 is for power to the IT equipment, $.055 is for associated data center cooling for the IT equipment, and $.065 is overhead associated with running multiple utility feeds, multiple generators, and multiple UPS systems for each and every client.

Colocation pricing models vary; be careful.

If you’re considering outsource data center facilities, you know that data center uptime and data center certifications are important. But the cost of data center power can affect the long-term IT budget. Choose an outsource colocation facility that charges fairly with low power costs. Choose Lifeline Data Centers.

There’s been lots of speculation about Google Energy, a new subsidiary the Internet giant has formed to buy and sell power on the wholesale market. At the Earth2Tech Green.Net event today, Google energy czar Bill Weihl said most of the speculation is overblown, joking that the company had no plans to emulate Enron as an energy trading power broker.

But Weihl laid out a scenario in which Google Energy might help the company access renewable energy to support its huge data centers.

“Supposing we had a facility scomewhere in the Midwest and have power contracts,” Weihl said, noting that Google typically signs multi-year utility contracts. “Let’s say there’s a developer who wants to build a wind farm on land nearby. We’d love to buy the power from that wind farm.”

More of the Data Center Knowledge article from Rich Miller

Google’s top energy executive has offered some simple steps for making data centers more energy-efficient, including raising the thermostat to 80 degrees Fahrenheit — or 27 degrees Celsius — to cut down on cooling costs.

Data center staff at some companies walk around in jackets because the buildings are kept so cold, said Bill Weihl, Google’s “green energy czar,” at the GreenNet conference in San Francisco on Thursday. “In our facilities, the data center guys are often wearing shorts and t-shirts,” he said.

The tips he offered have been batted around at data center conferences for a few years, but it’s likely that many companies still aren’t making use of them — especially to the degree Google does at its own tightly-run facilities.

By taking fairly basic steps, most data centers could lower their PUE to 1.5, Weihl said, compared to an industry average of 2.0 or more. PUE, or Power Usage Effectiveness, measures the total energy consumed by a data center against how much actually reaches the IT equipment.

More of the Network World article from James Niccolai

As any homeowner knows, air conditioning is more expensive when the temperature spikes outside because the room unit or centralized equipment has to work harder to keep a steady temperature. The same is true with a data center, albeit on a much larger scale and with the added complication of heat rejection, notes Peter Sacco, president of PTS Data Center Solutions (www.ptsdcs.com).

“Air conditioning will almost always be more expensive in the summer months due to the harder the A/C has to work in rejecting heat into a warmer ambient environment,” he says. “‘How much is too much?’ is less a consideration for summer operation as it is for constant operation.”

Here are some strategies for keeping power and cooling operations streamlined and steady as the temperatures rise.

Consider Larger Strategies

To better address power and cooling, data center managers have to look past incremental improvements, according to John Busch, chairman and CTO at Schooner Information Technology (www.schoonerinfotech.com). “Most of the power and cooling that is consumed is wasted due to inefficient use of processing and storage and communications equipment,” he says. “This is, to a large extent, a consequence of dated application and infrastructure software which does not effectively exploit radically improving processor memory technologies.”

more of the Processor Magazine article from Elizabeth Millard

I talked to a company last week who has been thinking about moving their data center. They have been talking with us for months about moving from another outsource data center into Lifeline. The company is an Internet Services Provider. All of their products are Internet-centric services. The company delivers Internet, web hosting, and applications to their clients.

The company was interested in Lifeline Data Centers for a few reasons. First, they could aggregate bandwidth from multiple carriers with no monthly cross-connect fees. This let them keep bandwidth costs low and maintain good margins. They also liked Lifeline’s data center power redundancy: Lifeline’s N+N power and HVAC configuration could support their needs for high uptime. One of the company’s owners liked the idea of Lifeline “always keeping an eye on the power.”

Last week, I spoke to them again. Some parts of their business are in decline, and other parts are growing. To cut costs, they are moving all their equipment out of the old outsource data center and into their new office building.

Are they really cutting costs?

What would a prolonged power outage cost this company ? ALL of the services they deliver rely on power, Internet services and application availability. Will their customers stay customers if a backhoe digs up the power line in front of the new office building and knocks out power for 8 hours? Or will the clients look elsewhere at the hundreds of vendors offering the same services for lower prices?

What is the company’s cost of losing a deal to a competitive Internet Services Provider? Will the competition win the deal because they have data center compliance, certifications, F5 tornado resistant data center buildings, and more telecom choices?

Who’s keeping an eye on your power? Who’s making sure that your computer room reliability is better than your competition? Who’s helping you take care of your clients?

What are the cost components of your data center? How are you spending money to maintain your computing environment?

In-house data centers spend money on

• Floor space or real estate
• Power to the servers and network equipment (sometimes untracked)
• Power to the air conditioners needed to cool the server and network equipment (often untracked)
• Generators, power conditioning/UPS, HVAC systems
• Security systems
• Maintenance of the generators, HVAC and UPS ad security equipment
• FTE support for the facilities side of IT
• Bandwidth and transport: limited choices and retail pricing from telecom carriers

Companies using outsourced data centers often spend on

• Rack space in shared environments
• Power costs based on something other than usage
• Expensive private suites
• Bandwidth and transport: limited choices and retail pricing from telecom carriers

Regardless, companies often purchase inferior services:

• No hardened data center facilities, or facilities not built to withstand a regional disaster
• Limits on power per rack, cooling and space that can drive up future costs
• Significant single points of failure in the power and cooling systems
• Time and money for internal IT resources to solve facilities and physical plant problems

Lifeline Data Centers is different. Lifeline offers outsource data center facilities with:

• Data center expertise
• High data center high uptime
• A simple data center pricing model that allows you to pay as you grow
• Mulitiple carriers in a carrier neutral data center
• No cross connect fees

Call Lifeline Data Centers at 317.423.2591 to learn how you can reduce costs while improving data center uptime.

Many of the applications “in the cloud” are running on servers and network equipment in outsource data centers like Lifeline Data Centers. Cloud service providers and IT organizations use Lifeline’s cloud computing data center for their high uptime, high density, and high bandwidth needs. These companies leverage Lifeline’s 99.995% uptime without having to invest capital in data centers like the new IBM facility described in the CCJ artilce below. Lifeline provides companies with affordable colocation, low data center power costs, access to multiple telecommunications providers, and no cross connect fees. Need data center space? Call Lifeline at 317.423.2591

IBM is opening a new, 100,000 square-foot data center in North Carolina to support new computing models, including cloud computing.

The new center is being built at IBM’s facility at Research Triangle Park campus and is expected to provide many services that will enable firms to deploy cloud-based apps quicker and easier.

IBM operates 450 of these data centers worldwide, and this new facility is aimed at helping clients across both the public and private sector operate more efficiently and in a more environmentally sound way, according to CMSwire.com

more of the Cloud Computing Journal article from Hovhannes Avoyan

To help combat increasing data center energy consumption, utilities and energy-efficiency program administrators are offering financial incentives for data centers to become more efficient. And there appears to be a real opportunity for many data center managers to reap financial rewards for measured energy savings.

A good starting point to identify available data center utility rebate programs is the Consortium for Energy Efficiency (CEE). CEE is a group of efficiency program administrators from the U.S. and Canada that works with over 100 members to promote energy-efficiency opportunities in data centers.

“CEE members offer prescriptive IT or data center measures to their business customers (a per-kilowatt-hour incentive) or provide program assistance to data center managers for a specific savings action that they might take,” said Jason Erwin, senior program manager at CEE.

more of the SearchDataCenter article from John Parkinson

ROEL Construction implemented Virtualization and storage solutions that improved data center operations and would scale to meet its future needs, while providing the eco-friendly and cost-saving benefits of reduced power and energy consumption.

When ROEL Construction needed a new cost- and energy-efficient solution that would centralize storage and be eco-friendly, the company opted for a virtual data center. Kevin Fitzpatrick, ROEL’s IT director, discusses the challenges, choices made and results of these efforts.

As a 90-year-old family-owned company operating in today’s roller-coaster business world, ROEL Construction strives to maintain its ideals and founding beliefs, which center on integrity, quality and trust. With more than 250 employees in five locations, including our headquarters in San Diego, we operate more than 25 job sites. Just fixing things that go awry in the normal course of business—a mistakenly deleted business-critical file or a server that is down—could take a whole week if we reacted to events as they happened.

Finding a way to proactively design our IT infrastructure to support the business, intercept problems before they occur and keep our company ahead of foreseeable IT challenges has been the key to making technology a driver of our success. One example is our effort to create efficiencies in our data center.

more of the Baseline article from Kevin Fitzpatrick

Stealthy startup SeaMicro isn’t saying much about its technology, which aims to “revolutionize the data center landscape” by slashing the power used in IT operations. The company recently got a $9.3 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy to further its development of technology to make data centers more energy efficient.

The initial buzz around SeaMicro has focused on its plans to build powerful multi-core servers using Intel’s low-power Atom chips, whose energy efficiency has made them the processor of choice for many mobile phones and laptops. The DOE grant mentions its plans to use hundreds of low-power processors in a design that could “save 75% of the computing energy over conventional servers.”

“The integrated hardware and software design project ensures that the energy consumed within the server is efficiently used regardless of whether the CPUs are hard at work or in ’sleep’ mode,” the DOE notes in its description of the project.

‘Complex Datacenter Appliance’
But SeaMicro’s secret sauce extends beyond the server. The company remains in stealth mode, but says in job postings that it is building a “complex datacenter appliance.” A review of the company’s patent filings reveal plans for a interconnection fabric that will knit together servers, storage and peripherals using hardware-based virtualization.

more of the Data Center Knowledge article from Rich Miller