Green Data Center : Why is it important?

By Aditya Mhatre at 23 December, 2008, 3:33 am

This is part 1 of a 3-part series about Greening of IT resources in the an organization.

According to IDC, the amount of money spent world wide on power and cooling server is set to double from $26 billion last year to $44 billion in 2010. The environmental agency in the United States estimated that data centers consumed around about 61 billion kilowatt-hours in 2006 and that’s likely to have increased now. But the fact is that power costs is only part of the problem. The rising property taxes too are putting pressure on the CIO to rethink their data center strategy.

A few years ago, Green IT was a considered to be a public relations activity but in the years to come Green IT may not be an optional. With research and development, Green IT now makes economic sense as well. This paper discusses how Green IT is now a veil for companies to carry out real resource optimization and performance engineering of IT asserts as well as an opportunity to do the environment a favor.

Background

The biggest component of Green IT without a doubt is the energy bill however Green IT initiatives aren’t limited to reducing the electricity bill alone. One has to take a holistic approach towards Green IT. It is an end to end effort that not only touches the electricity consumed by the desktops or server but also reducing the carbon footprint of employees working at a data center, recycling old computers/ servers as well as the landscaping needs at the data center/office.

A careful review of the current situation shows us that the lack of popularity for Green IT might be due to a systemic problem more than anything else. For years, energy consumption has been looked at as an administrative cost instead of as an operational cost of the business. In an IT organization, the electricity is consumed by the data centers but the payment of this bill is usually not part of the CIO budget. The bill is paid by the facility manager and hence has never been a concern for the CIO. The CIO never sees the electricity bill. Typically, facility manager also doesn’t think about optimizing the electricity consumed by the data center because his/her job is ensuring payment of the bill and not optimizing it.

Another reason for the rising energy bills could also be the lack of focus. Infrastructure managers mostly concentrate exclusively uptime and performance because these factors are directly tied to their performance index. Energy conservation rarely gets a mention on the list.

Going green makes economic sense

The Green IT initiative needs support from the top most executives in an organization. It is very important for the actions to be measurable else the green IT initiative runs the risk of being a mere corporate social responsibility activity. The operational changes that an organization can adopt to make its IT eco-friendly can be divided into technological changes and organizational changes.

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Categories : Technology