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State of the Green Datacenter
Symantec and Applied Research polled several enterprises to discover how they were faring IT-wise. Apart from the server, storage and personnel issues I discussed in that article, they also took a moment to report on the state of datacenter greening.
Unsurprisingly, the rising cost of running IT operations is the primary reason most are pursuing energy saving strategies, though social responsibility has a strong showing...
We asked companies why creating a Green Data Center was important to their workplace. Reducing electricity consumption was mentioned by 54 percent, followed by reducing cooling costs (51 percent) and a sense of responsibility to the community (42 percent).We then asked what they specifically planned to do within the next 12 months. Again, reducing annual energy costs topped the list at 28 percent, tied with recycling obsolete hardware, and followed by using cleaner power sources (21 percent).
According to the report, they plan to follow up with a more detailed study during the first half of 2009. We'll be watching out for it.
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Good data and perspective on the growing need for Green IT, and there’s little doubt that the forecasted economic conditions will be applying even more pressure for improved efficiency moving forward.
I’d be interested to learn more about the specific ways in which data centers are planning to reduce energy costs for the power-hungry, high RPM spinning hard disk drives. Data centers have multiple storage racks, and many IT managers must over-provision hard drives (3 to 4 times capacity needs) to meet growing performance requirements. Industry reports indicate that these storage racks consume 30-40% of the energy requirements for power and cooling in the data center.
There is a new class of solid state storage designed for this problem: Enterprise Flash Drives (EFDs). EFDs more efficiently meet the performance requirements than multiple high RPM disk drives and enable the replacement of many drives with a single EFD. This lets the data center ‘convert’ racks of storage into a shelf, and saves costs, energy (up to 80%) and space, and simplifies storage management. EFDs can fit into the existing infrastructure and can be managed with existing storage management software and tools. In these difficult times, data center IT managers need something more than traditional thinking and solutions to succeed.
Looking forward to seeing the follow-up study later this year.
Regards,
Greg Goelz
Pliant Technology (www.plianttechnology.com)