HP Adds to its Green Data Centre Offering

From Lauraibm

Ian Brown HP has added a new element to its portfolio of green data-centre services. HP Thermal Zone Mapping produces a three-dimensional model of exactly how much and where data-centre air conditioners are cooling. End-users can then arrange and manage air conditioning for optimal cooling. Comment: HP, IBM and Sun are involved in an arms race to prove that they are greener than the next guy. IBM's throwing $1bn per year at the issue of how to reduce energy consumption and costs as part of its Big Green Project. Sun has been designing more efficient processors and servers, as well as introducing environmental services of its own. Meanwhile, HP has been focusing on the data centre and how to cool it down - and yes, their servers are cool too... What problem are these efforts trying to solve? The move to Windows, Linux, and scale-out computing has filled data centres with racks of small, heat-producing industry-standard servers. In the most densely filled data centres, customers are consuming as much energy to cool server racks as they are to power them. Energy costs are becoming a major expense for the biggest computer users and it's a cost they could do without. Obviously, it's a problem that affects only the largest computer users and it's more of an issue in the US, where energy costs are rising faster and energy provision is under more pressure. But ironically, it's one that affects many service providers who have a lot of computer real estate, including those in Europe. Service providers could consequently become some of the biggest users of green data-centre services. So what about HP's offer? HP claims that Thermal Zone Mapping combined with its Dynamic Smart Cooling (DSC)-a hardware and software solution that continuously adjusts data-centre air-conditioning settings to direct cooling where and when it's required-can result in energy-cost savings of up to 45 percent. And there's the rub: the assessment service (around $100,000 for the full assessment) is not a quick fix for existing problems. It's one of a number of steps customers need to take to improve the energy efficiency of their data centres. Customers should be talking to their hardware suppliers about the whole span of services on offer from assessment to redesign of data centres and re-architecting of systems. Addressing the power and cooling issues is only half the story - virtualization, system management, and automation are also part of the solution to inefficient use of energy.