Ask anyone outside the enterprise IT department to identify the greatest data center cost, and they’re apt to say servers. That’s true in some businesses; hardware costs are not trivial. But the truth may be that large organizations are wasting money unnecessarily by literally blowing a lot of hot air because of inefficient data center airflow.
If you’re running your data center inefficiently, as many companies do, the cooling budget can be twice the cost of buying and running the hardware. That’s a lot of cash wasted on heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC).
A May 2015 IDC data center survey found that up to 24 percent of a data center budget can go to cooling. With a mean data center budget of $1.2 million for IDC’s enterprise clientele, that means that cooling alone costs $300,000 a year.
In a word: Ouch!