Guest View: What's It Mean to Be Green?

By Stephen Garrison

June 15, 2008 —  (Page 1 of 3)
While the notion of being “green” has become a familiar marketing concept, it offers IT managers very little in the way of tools for reducing escalating power and consumption needs and costs. The key to reducing power consumption in the data center is through an eco-efficient approach that integrates environmental, social responsibility and economic impact analysis into the planning and design processes. Additionally, the industry needs to create a clearly defined set of metrics that will allow organizations to conduct an apples-to-apples comparison of systems and infrastructure equipment.

The concept of “green” is a bit misleading in regards to computing and networking equipment, considering it requires power, and as new features are added, such as PoE, or system density increases, even more power is needed. Unless it is powered by a truly renewable energy source, it is a fact of operating a data center that you will not be “green.” Instead, a data center can aspire to be eco-efficient—implementing best practices in design, systems and technologies to optimize power consumption.

Design is crucial to establishing a solid foundation to build an eco-efficient data center. Considerations include not only how to lay out the racks, but more fundamentally, where to locate them. Whereas IT managers previously looked at how close a data center was to a major metropolitan area, today they should look at how close a potential data center is to renewable energy that can either power or cool the data center.

At the system level, much work is being done by vendors to reduce power consumption, including using lower voltage components and passive copper backplanes. Advanced management features that allow customers to tune power needs are also providing a way for enterprises to control escalating power needs. At the computing level, servers are increasingly being packaged with self-cooling systems, eliminating a significant source of power consumption.

Finally, and perhaps most significantly, technologies are crucial to ultimately optimizing the data center. Virtualization is at the top of that list for its ability to reduce, in a drastic and immediate way, the number of servers in a data center. While virtualization is in widespread adoption, it is not the only technology means through which data centers can control power consumption.

Related Search Term(s): Cooling, data centers, green computing, power

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