As the energy price keeps increasing, data center operators should begin thinking about how best to deal with these potential data center financial problems.
Data Center Financial Problems Due to Energy Price Rise
While energy cost is a common topic of discussion, many people need to consider the implications for data centers. The energy cost will likely rise in the next few years, which could significantly impact a data center’s financial health. The reason is that data centers consume a lot of energy and need to reduce their power usage during peak hours to save money. This means they will have to pay more in electricity costs even if they cut back on their use.
Data centers may be forced to change their operation because of the rising energy costs. They may have to hire more staff or buy new equipment to maintain their services while also saving money on electricity. Some businesses may keep operating as they always have, but this may mean cutting expenses elsewhere, like reducing the number of employees.
If companies want to avoid making significant changes to their data centers, there are two things that they can do. First, they can negotiate with their utility provider for lower rates by threatening to move operations elsewhere. Second, they can decrease power usage by upgrading systems or changing how they operate.
What are the best solutions?
The cost of energy is consistently rising, and the price of electricity is becoming a more considerable expense for many data centers. The cost of cooling data centers can be high, which causes the need to have a large amount of energy to keep the servers from overheating. Lower the cost of powering data centers; many solutions can help cut costs.
Increasing Efficiency
Access to power is one of the core components that must be considered when building or renovating a data center facility. The power supply must be reliable, sustainable, and secure.
There are two main ways that data centers consume electricity.
- The first is through active equipment, such as servers and storage systems, which require power to run at all times.
- The second is via overhead costs, which include everything outside of the active equipment in a data center, such as lighting, climate control, and cabling for networking. These overhead costs are often measured in kWh/SF/Year (kilowatt hours per square foot per year).
One solution would be to use hybrid cooling systems. Hybrid cooling systems make use of both air-cooled and water-cooled systems together. By using multiple cooling methods together, you can keep your center running more efficiently, which will cause you to use less energy.
Another solution is to change your current cooling system to use less energy while keeping the servers cool enough to run correctly. By lowering the amount of energy used during cooling, you will end up spending less money on energy bills overall.
Relocating Data Center to Indonesia
Rising energy prices are expected to be one of the main issues that could face data center operators by 2023. The price of electricity will increase by 22% globally, pushing the average cost per kWh to 6¢/kWh and forcing companies to relocate their data centers from high-cost countries.
This issue can be solved by constructing new data centers closer to users or by relocating current facilities to areas closer to end-users but still located in low-cost regions such as Indonesia.
Indonesia is considered one of the most affordable data center destinations in Asia. Indonesia has a large pool of human resources, especially for the IT industry. The country has low electricity prices and has met the standards of Cisco, Google, Microsoft, and other multinational companies. The government could also provide infrastructure development and human resources training incentives.
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Conclusion
We are living in the age of big data. The data we generate is growing tremendously; only some see it slowing down anytime soon. This has led to an increase in the amount of computing power required to keep up with this demand.
One way businesses have been able to keep up with this demand is by investing in data centers. However, as new regulations are implemented, and electricity prices continue to rise, the costs associated with these data centers can become too much to handle.
The energy price in the Data Center has become an area that needs to be monitored carefully. Today we will be looking at how data center managers can protect themselves from unexpected increases in their electricity costs while also exploring a few financial solutions to help mitigate the risk associated with energy price changes.