Companies alarmed by spiralling datacentre energy and air conditioning bills should not be afraid to turn off their systems, says one expert.

Bernhard Brandwitte, director of product marketing for Fujitsu Siemens Computers (FSC) enterprise server business, says European firms should follow their Japanese counterparts in tackling datacentre space, power and heat issues by switching servers off every evening.

“Switching off servers sounds strange because we are told never to touch a running system. But we can slowly rethink and start removing the information and identity from the server, bringing it into a combined storage device and switching off the processing core,” Brandwitte said.

However, the tactic is only suitable for non-mission-critical applications that do not require 24/7 access, and is facilitated by management software that enables administrators to remotely power systems up or down and transfer the processing load to other, poorly utilised, servers.

FSC estimates that the average cost of powering a single server with a purchase price of €2,000 is now around €350 per year with currently electricity tariffs, while the additional bill for air conditioning can double that figure.

The life of electronic and mechanical components, such as hard drives, is also adversely affected by inadequate system cooling, with mean time between failure (MTBF) halved by 10 degree temperature increases, estimated Brandwitte.

“The first challenge, obviously, is to reduce the energy consumption of the hardware, but we would also like to extend the capabilities of the server by giving it more processing power and providing an infrastructure that can actually handle the heat,” Brandwitte said.

FSC will also continue to examine ways of consolidating the number of physical servers required to perform the same level of application processing, and use virtualisation to optimise infrastructure usage.