Reducing energy costs in IT infrastructure: The case study of the University of Brescia

In the next future, the IT (Information Technology) infrastructures will increase due to the development in manufacturing management. The “Manufacturing 4.0” program advises that the IT infrastructures will grow, maybe differently, in every company. Consequently, the IT infrastructure costs will increase considerably and the related energy requirements and costs will increase, too. The aim of this paper is to apply an energy-economic analysis to evaluate the impact that the improvement of energy efficiency at the server rooms of the University of Brescia have had on the IT costs. To do that, an energy audit was performed before the IT improvement actions, as well as an energy audit after their implementations. At first, an economic analysis have shown the savings reached, based on the NPV (Net Present Value) and PBT (Pay Back Time) analyses. Successively, the PUE, Power Usage Effectiveness, has been evaluated, so as to appreciate the impact of the energy improvement actions on the performance of the server rooms. To make the PUE value comparable between the previews and the current configuration of server rooms of the University, a metric is provided. Finally, the DCIE, Data Centre Infrastructure Efficiency, is calculated and discussed.