By PRINCE OSUAGWU

Director Business and strategy of a Nigerian IT company KITS technologies limited  Mr Taofeek Okoya has advised Data centre operators in Nigeria and West Africa to think of adopting energy efficient design in data centre operations to cut cost and attract huge economic benefits that can reposition their outfits.

Okoya said that millions of servers being run, managed and upgraded without being actively used on a daily basis consume hundreds of millions of dollars on energy consumption cost.

According to him, up to $21.4 billion is wasted each year on hardware, maintenance, management, energy and cooling for unused servers in data Centres

He also quoted founder and  Chief Technical Officer of American Power Conversion, APC, Neil Rasmussen as saying that that it is possible to dramatically reduce the electrical consumption of typical data centers through appropriate design of the network-critical physical infrastructure as electricity usage cost has become an increasing fraction of the total cost of ownership (TCO) for data centers.

For him, through the design of the IT architecture, particularly when simple ‘no-cost’ decisions are made in the design of a new data center, it can result in savings of 20- 50% of the electrical bill, and with systematic effort up to 90% of the electrical bill can be avoided.

He noted that when considering that a data center can consume 10 to 100 times more energy per square foot than the average office building, and in some cases up to 40 percent of an organization’s carbon footprint, it is clear that managing energy in the data center is of paramount importance.

Okoya said that many Data Centre Operators across Nigeria and west Africa could testify to the huge Economic gains if energy efficiency is adopted in the initial design concept or in their day-to-day best practice operational management.

He added that, KITS technologies, in one of her efforts to address the challenge, would be hosting a professional training in Lagos, working in conjunction with Capitoline LLP of UK, to demonstrate the best practices in achieving an Energy Efficient Data Centre.

The training is targeted at all professionals involved in the Planning, Designs, Specifications and Operational Management of Data Centres.