Today, policy and business leaders are reaching a consensus that industry must address rising greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Leading enterprises are now turning to the practical challenge of determining how, how much, and at what cost to reduce emissions. Many are quickly realising that with the right incremental capital investments, their information and communication technology infrastructure offers a means to both abate GHG and reduce costs.
Green IT means business improvement
Firms that rank highest among the “Global 100 Most Sustainable Corporations in the World,” such as Amazon, Toyota, and Nike, have realised that focusing on limiting energy calories in the data centre and elsewhere pays profitability dividends on the financial side. IDC research indicates that companies reducing their metric tons of carbon per data centre workload by a factor of 55% also incurred 35% less cost per user session on a server.
What’s changing the game?
A number of phenomena are coming together now to heighten the focus on energy savings in the data centre. IDC research has shown that:
Server energy demand doubled from 2000 to 2005.
Power used by servers, cooling, and ancillary infrastructure in 2005 accounted for about 1.2% of the United States’ electrical usage.
Servers, cooling, and ancillary infrastructure used the equivalent in capacity terms of about five 1,000MW power plants.
Despite feeling concern over energy use and environmental impact, IT managers in these times must prioritise on reducing operational expense and managing the escalating costs of infrastructure and IT staff. Cost reduction and better protection from the risks posed by downtime take precedence over environmental motives.
But the evidence from IDC’s Business Value research indicates that efforts to reduce energy use do help companies save money and improve IT service levels. Data centre energy efficiency improvements such as consolidation through virtualisation have delivered strong value for businesses, helping them not only reduce energy use but also reduce server costs per user by almost 40%. In addition to allowing firms to decrease the number of servers they need by over 50% — providing attractive “consolidation” savings — virtualisation as a green solution reduces energy consumption and GHG emissions and also provides companies with the means to avoid application shutdowns when and if servers fail, reducing server outage hours per year by over 35%.
Blade systems are a key server consolidation and infrastructure management technology whose deployment can deliver the needed increase in performance while giving data centre managers new ways to cut power consumption and costs.
The latest server technologies from leading vendors such as HP are delivering industry-firsts in automated power management, with pay-back in as little as 30 days.
Next-generation storage solutions provide tools that allow users to estimate power consumption before constructing a configuration, and then monitor actual power consumption after the configuration is built.