Gas prices may be down, way down, but data center power costs are still going up. Data center power and cooling costs are going to be one of the huge drivers of increased IT costs in the coming years. Earlier this year, Network World ran a series of articles detailing the problem. Because servers, switches and routers have very few moving parts, generally power in is equivalent to heat out. Heat that then must be cooled.

ipHouse is working hard to position our network and data center for the future.  This fall, we initiated a huge virtualization project. By using high-performance, efficient, virtual servers, we have been able to reduce the total number of physical machines used for hosting email and web services without impacting performance. Mike, our CTO, has been blogging about the virtualization project in his multipart series, “Virtualization and the ISP.”

Of course, virtualization is only part of the solution. IT departments need to think about the power consumption vs. performance of every machine on their network and every machine they are thinking of getting. Decommission machines that are no longer needed. Replace outdated energy hogs and stop getting more machine than is needed for the task at hand.

For years, data center and colocation power and cooling costs have been hidden or ignored. ipHouse is working to fix that. We are looking at both the power used by our equipment and the power consumed by colocated equipment. Colocation pricing is being revised to have a power consumption component. We want customers to consider power when they are choosing servers. We are also encouraging customers to take another look at their network assumptions. Especially with virtualization, separate services do not necessarily need to be on physically separate machines. 

If you are considering a move to a more energy efficient network design and want a second opinion on server specs and choices, let us know. We have been helping customers make infrastructure decisions for more than a decade and want to make sure you make the right choices for your organization.