Greening of the Data Center

Several major factors are driving the emerging industry trend of “greening” the data center. First, many IT organizations have reached — or are approaching — the power and cooling capacity limits of their data centers. As a result, it’s difficult to accommodate or expand the IT infrastructure. They still have to respond to continually increasing demands for business services that require more servers, more storage, and more network elements. Another concern is that energy costs are high and rising to the point where power and cooling now account for a significant portion of IT operations costs. Finally, organizations are coming under increasing pressure to become good corporate citizens by reducing their power consumption to conserve energy.

Over-provisioning is a major contributor to excessive power consumption in the data center is. Organizations have created dedicated, siloed environments for individual application loads, resulting in extremely low utilization rates. The result is that data centers are spending a lot of money powering and cooling many machines that individually aren’t doing much useful work. Some are even sitting idle. The business benefit of “greening” the data center through consolidation and virtualization is optimizing power efficiency to gain maximum work output per watt consumed. This will help reduce operations costs. It will also permit organizations to continue to expand services to meet increasing business demands without requiring additional power and cooling. This is particularly important to organizations that have already reached the power and cooling limits of their data centers.