''When people talk about wanting efficient data centres they must be built on a modular, scalable basis. We have been saying that for years. We even put our engineering resources forward to bring that to the data centre sector''

Neil Rasmussen, senior vice president of engineering at APC by Schneider Electric, talked to DatacenterDynamics FOCUS about the problems of integrating data centre and building management systems, the issues with IT efficiency claims, why regulation is good and the current shortcomings with metrics

Neil Rasmussen says that a lot of the problems we see in data centres are connected to their relationship with the building. The vast majority of data centres are located in multiple-use buildings, so the systems are shared. It makes it hard to measure data centre efficiency when operations occur inside a multi-purpose building. You cannot solve the data centre efficiency problem without integrating with the building systems. This has to be done logically or you will lose out on efficiency.

You buy a watt from the utility company and only half of that makes it to the IT equipment, so already we have 50% of the energy use problem to solve. It is difficult to ascertain whether the improvement of efficiency of IT devices translates to a plateau or a decrease in the total installed wattage of IT because there is a lot of elasticity in that business. There is huge growth. If  IT demand is flat, power use would reduce. But if IT service demand is rising as efficiency is increasing, what does that say about the future of IT power?

We wrote white papers on over provisioning and over-specification of data centres six years ago. Over-specified data centres are all wasting energy – they were  commissioned correctly to meet the needs of five to six years from now, and are over-provisioned for the present as a result. So why did we build all at once – why not build to track the need?