What does that mean? Basically, you’re plugging all of your brand new servers, networking equipment, and other devices into a power strip that is no more advanced and provides about the same features as the electrical sockets in your house. You spend a lot of your time configuring your servers, setting up monitoring, and closely analyzing the up time, performance, and overall health of your equipment, yet your hosting company cannot tell you anything about the power that they are providing you and you are consuming. It’s time to insist on metered power, otherwise you are using old technology and you’re paying a premium for it too.

What does Metered Power have to offer?

1. 1) In order to provide metered power, your hosting company must have intelligent circuit monitoring equipment in place. This means that they can tell exactly how much power you’re using and can make sure that you are alerted if your current usage is approaching a point of tripping your breaker.
2. 2) With this monitoring equipment in place, you should be provided with a real time look at both the current level in your circuit and overall power consumption. This can be as simple as just a point in time snapshot of the values, or a graph over time, which is what we provide at EarthLink. Here is an example of what those graphs might typically look like:
3. 3) Probably the most important feature of metered power is that you only pay for what you use. Without metered power, companies will charge a flat rate for a circuit. It doesn’t matter if you plug in one server or fill up every U in an entire cabinet, you will pay the same amount for that circuit. The prices are typically high enough to more than cover the cost if the entire circuit is maxed out. In the end you are overpaying either a little or a lot. With a metered power circuit you only pay for what you use. When first starting out you can save a lot of money. You can also influence your costs by controlling the efficiency of your equipment or how you deploy that equipment. Don’t just take my word for it. Below I’ve compiled some example data. I grabbed the per circuit price from two national hosting brands who only offer fixed power pricing (and who will remain nameless for their own benefit) and compared that to a customer of ours who is using metered power.
   

   	National Host #1	National Host #2	EarthLink
   Voltage	120	120	120
   Amps	15	15	20
   Fixed Price – 1 circuit	$275/mo	$325/mo	—
   Metered Price – 1 circuit	n/a	n/a	$150.45*

   * Example customer: 2/3 of cabinet full and 2-20A circuits. Price is for one of the circuits.

Our metered power option can offer significant savings throughout your entire hosting engagement with us. Not only will you have a lower initial cost, but as you grow and need to add an additional circuit to your cabinet, there is no extra charge from us, just pay for your actual usage. Whereas the fixed price providers, will charge you the full flat rate even when you might just need one extra outlet to start.

I hope it’s clear what some of the benefits of Metered Power can be. It’s time to expect your colocation provider who is offering the latest technologies in their network infrastructure to upgrade their power systems to the same century.

To get to the portal, you will need to login with your email address and password at http://portal.earthlinkcloud.com/billing/. Once you successfully login, you will need to click on the “My Services” tab as shown below:

On the next screen, you will see all of the services that we are providing for you.  Next, you will need to click on the green arrow to the right of the appropriate service as shown below:

Once you click on this button, you will be placed into the “Client Area” for this service.  If your colocation service includes metered Bandwidth and/or metered Power, you should see something similar to the image below on this page:

From here, you can look at current and historical data.  The following is what your portal may look like:

If you have any difficulty finding this area within your Client Portal, please contact support.

The computer industry is currently faced with exponentially increasing operating cost as newer more powerful hardware consume more power per server multiplied with the increasing cost of energy.  Last year alone U.S. Data Centers consumed about 80 billion kilowatt-hours (kWh), roughly 2 percent of total U.S. electricity consumption and it is estimated that this figure will double over the next 5 years.  In order to combat this trend of increasing cost both for our clients and the environment, EarthLink selected only the most efficient power distribution and cooling technologies available; but this was only the first step. 

To measure the efficiency of a Data Center the industry uses a metric called PUE.  It stands for Power Usage Effectiveness which is a fancy name for a ratio that represents the total power coming into the Data Center divided by the amount of power used by the servers.  Over the last 3 months our team has created a Green Meter that calculates the efficiency of our Data Center in real-time, utilizing the network of revenue grade power meters that we have installed on all of our equipment. This tool has enabled us to tune our systems, which in turn, increased the efficiency of our Data Center by an additional 15%.  This tool also helped us realize that the efficiency of our Data Center is directly tied to outside air temperature.  As it gets cooler outside it takes less energy to keep the servers cool therefore we are able to increase the percentage of our total power usage that goes to the servers. For every degree we are below 80F the Data Center operates approximately 1% more efficient.   With the annual mean temperature of Rochester being 48 degrees Fahrenheit, combined with reasonable electric rates and great fiber paths in and out of the region, it makes upstate New York an ideal location for Data Centers.  Also evidenced by Yahoo’s decision to build their next Data Center near Buffalo.

What does all of this mean for our clients?  EarthLink is currently the only Data Center in upstate New York and one of the few in the country that offers revenue grade power metering for all of our electrical circuits.  By utilizing this branch circuit monitoring system, we are able to provide our colocation clients with variable rate pricing for electricity based on actual KWh consumed.  This billing system saves our clients money and rewards them for being responsible with their power usage.

Here is the most typical example if you would allow me to get a little technical on you for just a second:  You decide that colocation is a smart option for your company.  You find a data center that you trust and rent a full cabinet for all of your servers.  Your sales rep tells you that each one comes with one (1) 20amp circuit – just like the ones you have in your home or office, it is a standard US plug that can handle 20 amps of electricity flowing through it at 120 volts. (The first circuit is baked into the initial price of the cabinet) You plug in 8 servers, and your IT team tells you that they need another circuit for the 9th server which costs you $250/month.  Yes – that is correct – you have to pay a full $250/month to get that 9th server running, even though you will only be needing about 2 amps of the 2nd 20amp circuit. 

Doesn’t make sense?  The answer is pretty simple – find a data center that offers revenue grade metered power, and pay for just what you use.  I can assure you that you will save much more money in the long run, here is how:

In summary – power is now the biggest cost in any data center, and that is passed on to you.  By only paying for what you use, you will save money as well as help shift the IT world towards more green & energy efficient computing!  Want to know more on this? Feel free to email me directly.  Also watch for my next part in this series on real time energy efficiency monitoring in your next data center.