Maintaining good levels of datacentre availability is
more important than saving energy throughefficiency drives, said IT managers at
last week's
Data Centre Dynamicsconference.
A survey of 244 IT managers found that although 44.8% said
reducing power consumption was a growing concern for senior
management, keeping datacentres secure and running costs low were
higher priorities.
For most IT managers, promoting the savings that could be made
by reducing power costs was a more powerful force for driving
datacentre efficiency
than concerns over environmental issues.
Despite 82.4% ranking their datacentres as either "fair" or
"poor" when it came to energy efficiency, almost 50% said they did
not have the tools to collect information about how energy
efficient they were.
Neil Rasmussen, CTO at power and cooling supplier APC-MGE, said
the pressures of rising costs and legislation had changed user
reactions to talk of becoming more energy efficient, but measuring
efficiency remained a problem.
"You cannot control what you cannot measure," he said in a
presentation. "Users do not have efficiency data, and even if they
did, they would not know hot to act on it. Solving these problems
requires a standard language for describing and measuring
datacentre efficiency."
A separate study of 40 UK datacentre managers by Aperture
Technologies, which provides software to monitor datacentres, found
that 40% do not have a green IT policy.