Data center power projections to 2014

With the densification of electronics, predictions for electronics power trends have been closely watched. For semiconductors, the ITRS (International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors) has published power trends for processors for years. For electronic equipment such as servers, Uptime published a power trend in 2000 and more recently in 2004, ASHRAE published the "Datacom Equipment Power Trends and Applications" book that updated the uptime data and projected power for datacom equipment out to 2014. While this work has been extremely useful to the industry, it has caused some credibility issues with our end-users. If one takes the ASHRAE power trend at face value and assumes that all servers consume the projected power, the result would show that today's data centers should require in excess of 500 W/ft
²
. In reality, based on some customer data, the average data center capacity is only 61 W/ft
²
. A data center power density projection is needed so that IT organizations can develop data centers with adequate cooling for reasonable lifetimes. The paper discusses the need for something more than processor and equipment power trend projections which have overestimated the required infrastructure for customers. Among the reasons discussed will be data center power diversity as well proposing a new power projection from the data center perspective. This projection uses data from a survey of actual enterprise data centers and the ASHRAE projections to formulate a data center power trend projection