Is there a way to build a data center that generates as much energy as it consumes? Researchers at HP labs think so, and they’ve published a road map for how it might be done. They call it the Net Zero Energy Data Center.

Data centers burn a lot of energy, much of it inefficiently. That’s because most companies care more about keeping their software up and running than about energy efficiency. But over the past decade, some big web companies have fired up so many servers that they can save big money by reducing energy costs.

But big companies like Google and Apple have big money. They can cool their data centers with icy Baltic Sea water or build their own servers from scratch.



For people who are not setting up hundreds of thousands of servers at a time, the trick is to squeeze some more efficiency out of what they’ve got. And to that end, HP researchers have built some software that lets data center geeks predict and manage power consumption so that they’re using less power from the grid.

Then, adding a renewable power supply such as a solar array, they tweak the data center to run non-critical server loads such as backup when the sun is shining. The idea is to manage server workloads so that the data center uses a low amount of energy from the power grid at night, and then returns the power it used when the solar array is generating power.

HP hasn’t built the net-zero data center yet, but it’s getting close, says Cullen Bash, a distinguished technologist with HP Labs. “We’re able to reduce overall energy use in data centers by about 30 percent,” he says. “We’re about to reduce the dependence on the public utility grid by about 80 percent.”

This is experimental stuff, but it looks like the workload management software could someday make it into an HP services product. HP’s services group already sells tools that help corporations look at the total energy costs of the products they make.

Bash wants to apply some of those ideas to data center design — looking at the energy cost of building solar arrays or biogas plants — and one day design data centers that give as much energy as they get over their entire lifecycle. That means calculating things like the energy costs of building a solar farm.

“It’s not enough to look at operations. You have to extend that box to the overall life cyle of the entire data center,” he says. “Really it’s not about dollars or rupees or yuans. It’s about joules.”