Enterprise energy management systems can help to lower an
enterprise’s carbon footprint and make the data centre more
environmentally friendly, with the ultimate aim to reduce
operational costs through more efficient use of IT resources.
What is the purpose of an energy management system?
Building energy management systems could involve implementing a
specialised energy management control system, or energy management
software package, with the aim being to
reduce the carbon footprint of the business and lower IT costs
through
more efficient uses of power.
Energy management systems are an extension of traditional
systems management tools such as
CA Unicenter,
IBM Tivoli or
HP Openview.
However, the focus of energy management systems is on energy
efficiency, rather than the broader discipline of systems
management, which often focuses on application and network
monitoring and performance.
What are the core components of energy management?
Enterprise energy management involves the whole of the business,
and can touch any of its systems, from the
data centre to the front end PCs.
Manufacturers of processors, PCs, laptops and peripherals have
all been working to reduce their energy footprint. Most now offer
low-energy, high-performance, business-grade PCs incorporating
power-saving features.
Energy management can include powering down certain systems to
ensure they save on power; or sharing resources through
virtualisation or grid technology.
It can also involve monitoring and
management of power usage of servers and mainframes.
At a more granular level, energy management can involve the way
individual components are powered, alternative cooling
technologies, or server and storage systems that draw less power or
create less heat.
How can energy management systems benefit the data centre?
Energy efficient, or
green data centres will, first of all, benefit the environment,
because they draw less power and
require less energy to be produced.
As a result, data centre components are able to run more
efficiently and require less cooling, and this in turn
draws less power overall.
From an IT director’s perspective, energy efficient data centres
can lead to
lower cost data centres, as fuel bills fall and machines fail
less frequently, and even take up less space.
How can energy management systems benefit PC users?
The cost reductions from better energy management are worth the
effort according to experts. For example, global law firm
Freshfields Bruckhaus
Deringer expects to save £85,000 a year with a PC power
management tool from
IT Energy to cut power
costs on its 5,600 PCs by 34%.
In addition to saving nearly a megawatt of energy per year, the
project will reduce company-wide
CO2 equivalent emissions by 4%.
How are software vendors helping to provide energy management
tools?
Leading enterprise software vendors such as IBM are offering
tools to help companies to lower their carbon footprints.
In the case of IBM, it has designed software to help businesses
use its Tivoli, Lotus and WebSphere product families more
energy efficiently.
The company's
Software for
a Greener World initiative includes software designed to help
businesses address the growing need to maximise energy efficiency
and reduce costs associated with power and cooling.
Tivoli Monitoring software is designed to provide energy
management information that enables the optimisation of data centre
and facility assets.
Other products covered by the initiative include
WebSphere Virtual Enterprise, which provides application
infrastructure virtualisation for lowering operational and energy
costs.
How about other vendors?
Networking vendors are also selling enterprise energy management
systems. Cisco argues that its
Unified Computing architecture will save IT departments 20% on
their hardware costs and 30% on IT running costs, compared with
traditional systems.
The
Unified Computing
System brings together computing, network, storage access, and
virtualisation resources in a
single energy efficient system, the company said.
It promises to optimise virtualisation, reduce data centre
costs, and allow
dynamic resource
provisioning.
How popular are energy management systems?
A
survey from 2008 found that 65% of UK firms have no policy in
place to improve their energy efficiency, although half of these
businesses did intend to adopt an energy management system within
12 months.
However, a number of large corporates and service providers have
now invested in
green data centres and procedures, and the picture has improved
on 12 months ago, as firms start to be persuaded of the benefits of
going green.