Facilities and Data Centers Dance at Conference

By Alex Handy

July 18, 2008 —  (Page 1 of 2)
When it comes to heating up a room, the IT industry can give the heating and air conditioning industry a run for its money. At the DatacenterDynamics conference in San Francisco today, the hot topics of power and heat reduction were of top importance.

At the conference, Andy Broer, senior IT manager at Cisco Systems, detailed his company's movement towards dynamic power consumption adjustment. The goal of his project, which is not yet complete, is to enable the movement of virtualized workloads to data centers that can handle the extra heat, power consumption and connectivity.

“With data centers around the globe, if I've got a non-latency-sensitive application, I can base my job anywhere,” said Broer. Thus, if it's a hot summer in California and a cool afternoon in Massachusetts, power and cooling may be easier on the company budget if a necessary application is spun up in New England rather than Santa Clara.

Martin Otterson, director of data center and IT systems at OSIsoft, spoke alongside Broer on the topic of dynamic data center provisioning. He laid out a road map for systems managers who wish to move toward the Cisco model.

“Where do you start? IT and facilities must come together and generate best practices, where you're linking the two groups and agreeing [on] something like the implementation of agreed upon metrics,” said Broer. Additionally, he said that executive buy-in is of utmost importance.

It's in the Cables
Another stop on the road to less power consumption is in the cabling, said Ken Hall, program manager for Netconnect data center solutions at Tyco Electronics. Hall's presentation pointed out a number of areas in which power can leak through the cracks, even in the most efficient of environments.

“Every time you save a watt of power on electronics, you're saving a watt of power to cool it,” said Hall. While earlier Ethernet standards don't require a tremendous amount of power, Hall showed that gigabit Ethernet uses 1.8 watts of power per active port on most switches. Optical connections, however, use less electricity than all forms of copper cabling.

Related Search Term(s): data centers, HVAC, power, Cisco, DatacenterDynamics, OSIsoft

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