Planting the Seeds for Datacenter Greenery
July 17, 2007

The mantra for true believers in the Scale-Out Advantage is one simple word: consolidation. After all, it’s hard to move to a lean and flexible industry-standard environment if you’ve decided to keep your datacenter stuffed with an abundance of outdated and underutilized servers.

Sure, consolidation gives you a simpler, easier to manage environment. It also helps make your data center greener by cutting the amount of electric power needed to run and cool IT equipment.

Power is a big deal in today’s data center, not only in terms of its expense, but also in its availability.. In fact, the Green Grid consortium states that “power availability is one of the most important challenges facing datacenters,” and offers some strategies for reducing consumption.

Creating a green datacenter requires more than buying energy efficient servers and other equipment, though that’s a helpful first step. You also have to look at operations, both from an IT and physical infrastructure perspective, says Green Grid.

A key best practice is to consider electrical bills as part of a datacenter’s expenses. By doing so, you drive incentives to ensure that systems designs are efficient.

Power distribution systems operating far below their capacity, air conditioners that must deliver cooled air across long distances, inefficient cooling pumps and under-floor obstructions to airflow can all adversely affect power consumption.

Green Grid makes the point that overall system design, from floor layout to configuring power on server software, affects the energy efficiency of your datacenter more than individual devices. Fine-tuning air delivery via “close-coupling” eliminates the mixing of hot and cool air and can deliver uxexpected energy savings.

Other technologies that cut datacenter power consumption are energy efficient lighting that uses timers or motion detectors and blanking panels in racks to keep server inlet temperatures cool. Of course replacing obsolete servers with highly efficient multi-core servers and using virtualization to consolidate onto fewer platforms are also a big help in reducing power bills.

The point is, achieving datacenter “greenery” requires thinking a bit outside the box. But there are big savings to be had, along with the knowledge that you’re doing the right thing.

Previous Blog Posts
11.07.07 - Scaling Out Strategically
08.28.07 - How to Cut Costs and Save the World
07.17.07 - Planting the Seeds for Datacenter Greenery
06.26.07 - Scale Out Zen — Do More with Less
06.14.07 - iSCSI...About to Go Mainstream?
05.30.07 - Is Your Data Center in a State of Quiet Desperation?
05.17.07 - EPA Data Center Guidelines: IT Power Use Is in the Spotlight
05.09.07 - Virtualized Data Needs Protection, Too
04.19.07 - Disaster Recovery on the Back Burner? Careful, It May Catch on Fire
04.10.07 - Professional Help for the Data Center
03.27.07 - Survey Shows Virtualization Taking Off
03.14.07 - Tackling Data Protection Alphabet Soup
03.07.07 - The Cost of Not Protecting Data
02.28.07 - Going Green to Conserve Energy in the Data Center
01.30.07 - Global Warming in the Data Center
12.02.06 - Open Standards Is for Systems Management Too
11.22.06 - Virtually Ready for Primetime
11.14.06 - Technology No Substitute for Communication
10.16.06 - Running a Data Center? What's Your Problem?