SNW Europe: Call for Greener Storage and Data Centres (30-Oct-07)
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Full story: SNW Europe: Call for Greener Storage and Data Centres (30-Oct-07)
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User panel at SNW Europe outlines the realities of what can be done to minimise the power and heat impact of storage in the data centre.
Storage vendors, as well as users, need to make more of an effort to improve the green credentials of the data centre.
So claim end users that have called for the industry to do more to sustain business demands for greener data centre computing, as well as urging other users to do more with existing technologies.
Speaking at the Storage Networking World Europe conference in Frankfurt, a panel of European end users from large organisations outlined their experiences and some of the efforts they are making today to reduce the power and cooling requirements of their data centres.
"The issue of power consumption is becoming a clear business issue, particularly in terms of the cost of power and how this cost can be reduced, and IT is a major user of that power" said Jens Leischner, chairman of storage networking user group SANBoard.
As one of the largest power consumers in the UK, BT spends a large part of its annual expenditure on electricity. The company uses 0.75 per cent of all the electricity used in the UK annually, highlighting the need to reduce its power requirements.
"One of the things we have done is rationalise the conversion of power in the data centre. At one stage we were going from AC to DC for some systems and back to AC again for others. Now we go from AC to DC and run the servers off DC power, resulting in a massive saving in power," said Steve O'Donnell, global head of data centres and bridge operations for BT.
"We have also taken steps to use fresh air cooling, which also has a positive effect on power use as it reduces our reliance on air conditioning," he added.
The panel expressed concern about the increasing use of green computing as a public relations tool, one that is used to improve the market credibility of a company without efforts actually being made to address the carbon footprint of the organisation's data centre.
"Ultimately there is so much business involved in green computing, it all boils down to money," said Charles Inches, chairman of the SNIA Europe user council and director for service delivery and logistics at financial services company Corner Banca.
"It is important that we don't let green computing become just another buzz term. There is progress at the moment because we are all under cost pressure, but what will happen when that subsides?" he added.
However, tacking the green credentials of the business can have both image and financial benefits, if done properly and can be done with existing technology, as two of the panel were keen to stress.
"Companies such as Oracle have invested millions into making their data centres green. Has Larry Ellison done this out of guilt - I doubt it, he as done it because it is good for the bottom line as well as for the reputation of the business," said panel chairman Steve Duplessie.
"Just because it is green doesn't mean it'll get sign-off, there has to be a business case for the investment, there has to be clear benefit," added O'Donnell, speaking about BT's approach to justifying spending on green IT initiatives.
The panel added that companies need to deploy tools for measuring energy efficiency, and it is becoming essential to have the ability to measure power consumption as IT departments continue to stuff more into data centres.
"Even doing something simple such as putting the manufacturer-stated power consumption data for all the data centre hardware into a spreadsheet can reveal startling facts about power use," said Ronny Eliahu, a storage architect for Nestle.
"Doing this we realised that some of our larger hardware was in fact pretty efficient, while some of the smaller kit like switches, which we didn't suspect would be high power users, were drawing huge amounts of power in normal operation," he said.
- Source: IT Pro
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