Walking down the high street you notice the outcomes of India’s growing prosperity; the glitzy malls, towering skyscrapers – home to some of the renowned brands, posh apartments with a swimming pool and gym, among others. The streets lights are out, and clouds of black smoke hovering around roof tops let you know that it is diesel-fed generators that is lighting them up.
The success of Corporate India works around these hurdles. The Tata Consultancy Services’ six story building in Gurgaon, Delhi, maintains five giant generators, with an underground tank of diesel of 20,000 litres. This is almost the same quantity of fuel one would find in a petrol pump. The reserve fuel can power the Tata building for up to 15 days. And power cuts average eight hours a day during shortage periods.
Perhaps the best place to look at corporate energy problems is in the heart of a company – the data centre; often a not-so-miniature metropolis of server computers that processes network transactions. As businesses grow, their data centres reach a breaking point. In most cases, computers on both ends of the network use – and waste – huge amounts of electricity. 
Companies do not take a closer look at energy consumption. The disconnect here is because the persons who buy the computers and servers do not usually pay the electric bill. Since the CIOs are not calculating the electricity costs in their purchasing decisions, companies may be burning money. Many firms are now feeling the pinch as larger proportion of IT spend is dedicated to energy.
Energy statistics
Considering India, the figures of future requirement are gigantic. In 2030 the estimated energy requirements will be higher by a factor between 4 and 5.
Jyoti Satyanathan, Country Manager, eServer pSeries, IBM India says, “Our country is already facing an energy crisis.  At the current electricity capacity we face a shortage of nearly 11 per cent, which will get worse. It is important for Indian organisations to start thinking about this seriously, and make appropriate investments so the energy spends can keep pace with their growth.”
“The management in organisations is not worried about power costs as they are part of the overall expenses. But when the traffic and data increases, they will be massive,” says Arnab Roy, General Manager Marketing, Sun Microsystems India.
Manoj Suvarna, Country Head for HP StorageWorks Division, Technology Solutions Group, HP India Sales says, “At present in India it is only the large organisations that will see immediate benefits from the solutions.” To get a perspective about power consumption, consider 15 to 20 watts requirement per server. As a company grows, more servers are added. Multiplying the power needs per server, figures reach requirements in MegaWatts.
Large enterprises that feel the power crunch in data centres are the telecom, government, healthcare, banking and financial services, airports etc. The manufacturing sector is also seeing major growth.
Solutions
Companies are developing data centre solutions by simplifying use of energy efficient programmes and technologies without compromising IT performance.
Many organisations are complaining that they face over-provisioning of cooling capacity. Reducing energy consumption in cooling can help bring down the operational costs to a large extent.
The other culprit in power consumption is the legacy systems. Newer products are generally more energy efficient, easier to maintain and more productive. For example one such technique for reducing energy consumption is using virtualisation. This allows businesses to maximise the use of each server.
“This approach will enable customers to require less data centre power and bring down the electricity bill for enterprises,” says Rajan Anandan, Vice President, Dell India.
Considering the total number of organisations deploying these energy efficient solutions, combined together have the potential to save about $1 billion in energy costs per year worldwide. This would be like avoiding the equivalent emissions of removing about one million cars from the road. All units of power saved are units of power generated.