From Heroes of the Office to Heroes of the Planet

Traditionally, environmentalism has been at odds with economic prosperity. Thanks in part to advances in information technology, communications, computer-aided design, and planning, this is being challenged in the IT industry today. IT professionals are increasingly being asked to do more with less and are quite familiar with achieving efficiencies in applications and data center operations. Many IT professionals have already increased power and cooling efficiencies in their data centers through the strategic application of specific technologies. Today, the entire industry is in the planning stages of green data center operations.

Evolving to a Green Data Center

Because there is no global, industry-recognized standard that defines what a green data center is, each organization must come up with its own definition of Green IT. A data center is generally a purpose-built facility or portion thereof that houses a business's critical applications. A green connotation supposes the facility has either been retrofitted or initially designed to mitigate its power consumption through the strategic application of available technologies. The long-term goal of the green data center operation is to achieve carbon neutrality.

Whatever a data center manager's definition of green, a moral, financial, or capacity motivation to pursuing this agenda can be assumed. For a business operation to demonstrate success in implementing a green strategy, the strategy must be measurable. A variety of measurement methodology options are available today, but many of these options may be too costly in terms of time and resources to implement when the scope of internal integration is accounted for. To IT, knowledge is power, but the collection and interpretation of the vast quantities of data in a data center must be simple, intuitive, and reliable.

Recently, we have seen a surge in new technologies that have driven up power capacity and density requirements in IT, mainly in server- and storage-related operations. The data center network has not traditionally been a major contributor to the power problems faced in today's data center, mainly because of the relatively low consumption of power by the network compared to the overall power consumed in a data center. But as the network has evolved to include higher levels of intelligence, its corresponding power requirements have grown and will continue to do so. This correlation between function, intelligence, feature sets, and corresponding power requirements is a crucial concept and ultimately it's the end-user who must decide how to balance power consumption with service levels.

The Blade Era Meets the Green Era

Much attention has been focused on blade form factors in server platforms in recent years. Although true blade servers do present density and capacity concerns for older data centers, these concerns are distinct from concerns about the efficiency of electrical consumption.

Where the concept of green is concerned, efficiency is the focus. More effective use of existing power supply corresponds to fewer emissions resulting from commercial power generation. Because data center efficiency is in part a cumulative calculation of how disparate IT infrastructure interoperates with supporting facilities, blade capacity and density requirements must be aligned with facility design to achieve maximum efficiency benefits. In most cases, this means building a new data center to support higher densities, mainly because of the high cost of upgrading existing infrastructure to support higher densities.

Gartner Research recently analyzed the cost of retrofitting an existing 800-kilowatt (kW) data center designed to support rack densities from 2.5 kW per rack to 20 kW per rack through the introduction of blade servers. The effect of these servers was based on replacing one-third of the capacity of the data center with high-density blade configurations. The study found the center's annual estimated operating expenses rose from $800,000 to $4.6 million.

In the Gartner case, the deciding factor is whether the cost of the supporting equipment outweighs the capital and operating costs of the IT equipment it supports; such is the cost of not aligning facility design with the design of the IT infrastructure. The problem persists because many IT professionals responsible for buying IT equipment have little insight into the facilities that support their infrastructures.

The Challenges Between Facilities and IT

Today's digital consumer continues to ask for better processing performance, more storage space, improved access, and lower latency, causing IT vendors, under constant cost pressures from shrinking IT budgets, to focus increasingly on optimizing their solutions. But innovation has limits where the physics of power and cooling mechanics are concerned. Therefore, it's important to understand that IT infrastructure performance correlates directly to the size, weight, power, and cooling requirements of a given solution.

With the introduction of blade and service module form factors, the IT industry realized it could do much more with less space. The capacity problems that have arisen have led many in both the facilities and IT industries to look more closely at optimizing existing data centers to accommodate desired performance levels, often to gain some time to plan a new facility. It has also led vendors in the IT space to look more closely at designing products with facility considerations in mind. Further, this focus on power and cooling has brought today's data center to the forefront of the green agenda, because it is clear that green sense makes economic and operational sense in this IT environment.

Regulatory Compliance

Although no global or broadly accepted standards exist today for data center efficiency, there is anecdotal evidence that regulation is being considered. With the passage of the U.S. House of Representatives Resolution 5646 in July 2006, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Energy Star program is now researching data center energy consumption, industry measures for server efficiency, and energy-saving technologies.
The recently formed Regional Green House Gas Initiative, led by nine U.S. states, is a program seeking to provide flexibility in the way emissions from commercial operations are managed. This concept of self-regulation in an open-market framework through the trading of carbon credits is similar to the concept behind many programs that exist in the European Union.

Myriad public and private efforts are now directed at addressing the broad range of concerns related to global climate change. Clear leadership is emerging within the IT industry, which is positioned very well to maximize the benefits of existing technology while investing in future green technologies.

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