Why The Super Bowl is A Model for Data Center Consolidation Perfection

The Super Bowl continues to be one of the most watched television events in history, year after year. In fact, last year’s game where the New England Patriots took on the Seattle Seahawks became the No. 1 most watched televised event ever with an astounding 114.4 million viewers.

And while you might be thinking about the outrageous strain on bandwidth—and thereby power consumption—required to broadcast this live event to televisions across the nation, the Super Bowl is actually one of the most energy efficient live broadcasted events. Here’s why…

Football fans host Super Bowl parties, where friends and family unite under one roof to watch the game together. That means a group of 20 people are viewing one television, rather than 20 separate ones. As well, the party guests mostly likely shut off the lights and unplugged unnecessary appliances at their own homes before heading out to the party, thereby saving energy in that regard.

As such, the event becomes more efficient in that viewers are optimizing their resources, i.e. consolidating their cable and electricity usage, by sharing one television. The result is a major energy-saving touchdown.

So, take a page from football fans’ books and model your data center power infrastructure strategy after a Super Bowl party. That is, rather than running multiple servers at a quarter of their potential power, consolidate your workloads to maximize your power capacity. For example, server virtualization enables you to partition physical servers into smaller ones to maximize your resources. Rather than dedicate each of your servers to one task, share the workloads—just as football fans share their televisions—in order to optimize efficiency.

With that said, there are environmental and safety precautions that must be considered before employing a virtual environment. Without advanced power monitoring and measuring technology you run the risk of over-heating servers that are running at maximum capacity. As well, tracking the power consumption of servers is essential to ensuring that virtualization is running correctly and truly proving to be an energy and cost efficient strategy. Consider implementing an All-in-1 PDU solution which affords the power measurement and management tools necessary for running a successful operation.

Consolidating your power consumption is vital to the stability of your data center. But once you’ve implemented a sound consolidation strategy, the results will make you want to break out into your very own touchdown dance.