Balancing the growing IT needs of enterprise with the
environmental need to reduce carbon emissions is going to be
difficult.
Preserving high levels of system availability and redundancy,
coupled with the rising number of datacentres, seems directly at
odds with being energy efficient.
Businesses may associate risk with a green strategy because they
will need to change their IT set-ups. However, there is an equal
risk in maintaining bad system design, which wastes energy and can
add to the total cost of ownership.
Blade servers, for example, may offer more processing power per
square foot and save space in datacentres. But you have to account
for the additional power costs of keeping them cool. Going green
could help cut such costs.
Improvements can be made elsewhere too. Optimising the way power
is transmitted through a datacentre means investigating components
such as cabling, cooling, UPSs and even processors, to see where
efficiencies can be achieved.
Simplifying complex set-ups to use power more efficiently could
increase resilience and reliability at an operational level, while
also reaping corporate benefits. Investors, insurers, and
policy-makers are now taking a serious interest in energy use and
the environment.
Just as harmonising different IT components can reduce overall
energy consumption, the success of green policies will require a
consensus between the government, IT suppliers and end-users.
Judging from the opinions expressed at this year's
Datacentre Dynamics conference and the
launch of the
Green Grid consortium the willingness is
there. The acid test is whether consumption drops despite IT's
hunger for more power.
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