Recent datacentre product announcements from IBM and HP show
that
energy consumption in the datacentre is now attracting
high-level attention at both enterprises and IT suppliers, analyst
Ovum has said.
IBM has announced enterprise additions to its
Project Big Green last week, which saw the introduction of
modular datacentres that are designed to save energy.
This came after HP announced its Sustainability Laboratory to
address long-term datacentre issues. Ovum said that both offerings
introduce an immediate opportunity for savings in energy use,
accompanied by a strong financial investment case through
monitoring and intelligent control systems.
IBM talks of the payback period from investments in this area
being less than two years. And both back their claims with case
studies, "although at this early stage these are thin on the ground
at present", said Ovum.
"The environmental payback period may be longer where this
involves hardware replacement," it said.
Graham Titterington, an analyst at Ovum, said, "The demands on
information processing systems are growing exponentially. IBM
expects server usage to grow six-fold and the volume of stored data
to grow 70-fold over the decade, and these figures are consistent
with Ovum's own research."
"Technology is delivering efficiency improvements, but these
tend to be linear in nature. Consequently energy use by datacentres
is still rising rapidly. In the longer term we need changes in
business processes, data retention practice and law, and a change
in expectations," he said.
Firms need to question how much processing they do, how much
data they hold, and for how long, he said. The present tendency to
hold everything that it is technologically possible to hold will
have to be challenged, said Titterington.
Systems are needed that can store a single copy of a document
and not replicate it multiple times across an organisation, without
this causing problems for users, he said.
HP is developing optical computing in the datacentre as a major
plank to its long-term objective of cutting datacentre energy use
by 75%.
HP also claims it has achieved a 40% energy saving at a new
datacentre it has recently built in Bangalore by deploying its
"smart cooling" technology.
And IBM claims similar savings by deploying upgraded Tivoli
monitoring software to measure power usage.
Both firms are also promoting server virtualisation as a way to
cut energy bills.