Adopting energy efficiency has been described as the potential remedy to the high costs being incurred by Nigeria and other West African countries, according to KITS Technologies.
The ICT solutions company said the West African country should make energy efficiency an integral aspect of their initial design concept.
Taofeek Okoya, the company’s Director of Business and Strategy, said data centre experts all over the world had observed that millions of servers are operated, managed and upgraded, although they are not being actively used daily. He said the cost is running into several millions of dollars.
“These unused servers consume hundreds of millions of dollars in energy consumption cost. In addition, up to US$21.4 billion is wasted each year on hardware, maintenance, management, energy and cooling for unused servers in data centres,” the director said.
In the light of this anomaly, he said his company is set to address the challenges by hosting professional training in Lagos. The training is being put together by KITS Technology in partnership with Capitoline LLP of UK.
He said the goal of the Lagos training is to demonstrate the best practices in achieving an Energy Efficient Data Centre (EEDC).
On the issue of the target audience, he said the training will benefit all professionals that are involved in the planning, designs, specifications and operational management of data centres.
The five-day training starts today (Monday) with a free seminar where specially selected topical subjects will be handled with the technical managers of various companies involved in Data Centres Operations.
Neil Rasmussen, Chief Technical Officer of American Power Conversion, recently stated usage costs of electricity in recent times has become an increasing fraction of the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) for Data Centres.
According to him, a drastic reduction in the electrical consumption of typical data centres is feasible with the appropriate design of the network-critical physical infrastructure.
It could also be aided with the design of the Information Technology (IT) architecture.
“That simple ‘no-cost’ decisions made in the design of a new data centre can result in savings of 20-50 percent of the electrical bill, and with systematic effort, up to 90 percent of the electrical bill can be avoided,” he said.
