Do you know how much power the industry consumes on account of information technology data centres and servers annually? It is a whopping 14,000 MW!

“The industry is consuming this much power to run about 43 million servers in various locations across the globe,” Mr V. Srinivasa Rao, Senior Vice-President of Mahindra Satyam, said, quoting a survey.

Computer servers and data centres consume a huge amount of power to run round the clock and on the cooling infrastructure.

Addressing a Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI) meeting on cloud for small and medium businesses here on Tuesday, he said this happened because companies deploy servers and data centres with huge capacities keeping in view peak requirements. “They install huge capacities to suit their future requirements. They, however, consume only a fraction of this capacity till then,” he said.

As a result, only 5-10 per cent of the aggregate capacity of these 43 million servers is consumed. Yet, the cost of operations and power consumption remains the same.

“Deployment of cloud solutions could address this issue and save power and costs. In the cloud, you will only use the capacity you actually require at that moment. It is easy to scale up the capacities and pay accordingly as you go,” he said.

Delivering the keynote address on ‘Bursting the cloud myths’, the Chairman and Managing Director of CtrlS, Mr P. Sridhar Reddy, said the companies could save up to 40 per cent of their capital expenditure by sourcing their computing needs to the cloud.

>kurmanath.kanchi@thehindu.co.in

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