"Greening" of technology

Any discussion of the IT industry's future inevitably turns to the overarching trend of “greening.” Many IT organizations have reached the power and cooling capacity limits of their data centers. Yet they still have to respond to continually increasing demands for business services that require more servers, more storage and more network elements. At the same time, energy costs are rising to the point where power and cooling now account for a significant portion of IT operations costs. And yet, while demand for more servers and more energy use goes up, organizations are coming under increasing pressure to become good corporate citizens by reducing their power consumption to conserve energy.

Given all this, how can IT and business scale up and “green up” at the same time?

Many organizations have more servers than they need. According to industry estimates, servers typically operate at only five to 20 percent of full processing capacity. Data centers are spending a lot of money powering and cooling machines that individually aren't doing much useful work. Some are even sitting idle. One way to address this problem is through server consolidation and virtualization.

Solutions providers focused on helping IT meet business objectives should offer solutions that enable organizations to consolidate and virtualize their data centers, and to effectively manage the resulting dynamic virtualized environment. This approach will help IT organizations to more effectively monitor, measure and report on power consumption, as well as create a historical database of power consumption by device.

From the May 2008 Issue of SCMagazine »