Rows of flashing slot machines buzz throughout Viejas Enterprises' tribal casino. An outdoor arena erupts with light and sound as entertainers such as country singer Randy Travis and comedian Bill Cosby take the stage. Energy emanates freely from the epicenter of this Indian reservation 30 miles east of San Diego -- that is, except inside its data center.

 

Two years ago CIO Moti Vyas' IT staff was plugging new servers into the nearest outlet inside a cramped server room, only to receive calls from the facilities department. You're drawing too much power from the circuit, they said. More power would also be needed to cool the new servers, yet the server room was nearing its power threshold. All this because Viejas Enterprises was trying to keep up with Californians' growing appetite for gambling and entertainment.

 

So Vyas added another server room to gain a little more power and space -- a temporary fix as he planned a grander solution. Viejas Enterprises eventually made a multimillion-dollar investment to build an energy-efficient data center. "There were business drivers and technology drivers," Vyas says. "Business drivers were to support today's business and plan for tomorrow's needs. The technology drivers were power, cooling due to blade servers and virtualization, security and future-proofing."

 

Like many CIOs, Vyas had hit a wall when faced with the need to scale up his server room, largely because of energy concerns. Last year U.S. data centers consumed more than 60 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity at a cost of about $4.5 billion, according to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). A good chunk of this power -- up to 60% in some cases -- is needed to cool servers. Data centers accounted for almost 2% of this country's total energy consumption, not to mention massive harmful carbon emissions.

 

These numbers have risen quickly, nearly 40% between 1999 and 2005, according to a survey by the Uptime Institute, a provider of educational and consulting services. And they may double in the next five years to more than 100 billion kilowatt-hours, according to the EPA.

 

"Electricity, which is the lifeblood of data centers, is going up," says Andrew Fanara, product development team leader for the EPA Energy Star program, a voluntary labeling program initiated in 1992 to promote energy efficiency in products such as computer hardware. "When demand for something goes up, prices go up. We've been starting to see that for quite a few years, and you probably can expect more of that in the future."

 

If your eyes are glazing over at these massive numbers, here's one from AFCOM, an association of data center professionals, that will wake you up: Over the next five years, power failures and limits on power availability will halt data center operations at more than 90% of all companies. Market researcher Gartner Inc. predicts 50% of IT managers will not have enough power to run their data centers by 2008. Expect a rise in outages, along with a pressing need to add more space and power to meet computing demands.

Faced with such an acute need, Vyas spent six months researching and crafting an energy-efficient data center design. Everything from business-case analysis to power supplies to the local weather factored into the plan. Emerging technologies, of course, played a major role. "The new paradigms of blade servers and virtualization forced us to revisit and change our design completely, from cooling to airflow to power requirements," Vyas says.