When it comes to establishing a data center, there are three ways generally recognized to do so. It can be set up wholly on the business’ premises, wholly in the cloud, or by using a mix of cloud and physical systems. This is called a hybrid data center, and for some businesses, it’s just what the doctor ordered. Yet there’s a problem with hybrid data centers that their operators are starting to discover: how much power they’re using.

Why Hybrid Data Center Efficiency Isn’t up to Par

Hybrid data centers work on two sides of the data center coin, and as it turns out, the physical side is burning plenty of electricity.

Who’s reporting PUE? The power utilization effectiveness (PUE) measure has been falling since 2007. Given that this is the preferred metric of data center efficiency, this would seem to be good news. It’s even better when you consider the PUE is now around 1.58 – the best ever seen. However, only 26% of respondents are actually reporting PUE.

New technologies slowly adopting. Major companies have been working on new methods to improve their power consumption rates. Microsoft has been spotted working with tidal energy, while Google uses AI and cooling system snapshots to determine optimal operations. What do smaller firms without those resources do?

More power required. Blockchain applications, the growth of the Internet of Things, analytics, and more are all coming in to vogue. This means ever more processing power is required, and in turn, more electrical power required to run it and maintain processes associated with it, like cooling the now more feverishly running equipment.

Starts and stops. With almost a third of subjects in an Uptime Institute study reporting that they’d had a downtime incident of some kind, and 80% noting their most recent outage was preventable, there are clearly plenty of starts and stops involved. When a downtime incident occurs, the system has to work longer and harder to recover from the lost time, and that means less efficient operations.

What If Your Hybrid Data Center Isn’t Sufficiently Efficient?

If the power bills for your hybrid data center are giving you terminal sticker shock, it’s time to do something about the problem by reaching out to us at EmconIT. Our cloud and colocation systems will help take weight off the physical side of your hybrid data center, and help improve power consumption accordingly while still offering five-nines reliability. So when you want the reliability of physical operations without all the power consumption, just get in touch with us to get started.