As energy costs escalate and begin to hog a disproportionate share of companies’ overall technology costs, green technology is likewise being catapulted as a priority in many IT decision makers’ lists. Green computing is making its case as an opportunity to substantially cut costs, maintain growth and improve a company’s corporate reputation while at it.

However, many companies would still tend to stop short of allocating new capital for a green technology initiative. Finding solutions that greatly save on operating costs while maintaining the current budget outlay is still the common real-world business response for both small and large companies.

Fortunately, there’s room for creative alternatives in this regard, insofar as improving the energy efficiency of existing assets while delivering more information and processing capacity to meet the growing needs of the business.

The Uptime Institute, a provider of educational and consulting services for facilities and IT organizations in the US, suggests that looking for incremental changes impacting on the existing data centre assets usage could be an effective approach, with the added value of extending the life of those assets. In this regard, the following cost-cutting and avoidance measured may be considered for Philippine data centers:

1. Knowing the Baseline and Projected Consumption

Finding out the present and projected energy consumption and costs across the data centre, and the total power and cooling capacity beyond the average required by daily operations can help companies focus their initial efforts on areas where it is and will be most needed.

To know how power in the data centre is currently consumed, a company may ask the following questions:

• What are the peak power demands of the data centre?

• How much of the power delivered at the utility meter is consumed by power conditioning equipment? By cooling equipment? By IT equipment including servers, storage and networking assets?

Getting the right answers in details will allow a company to objectively configure the set of improvements that will best impact on efficiency vis-a-vis the operating expenses and capital requirements.

2. Re-assessing Floor Space Allotment

Floor space allotment is one of the first targets for efficiency improvements. Doing away with superfluous equipment serves to reduce expenditure for new floor space and lower data centre power consumption and heat output. Companies should not only analyze storage and server utilization rates, but also classify applications and information to identify where service level mismatches exist, which applications are no longer being used, and which information is no longer being accessed.

3. Analyzing Efficiency in Power and Cooling

Taking a good look at cooling capacity and its associated power consumption can show where possible wastage happens. By applying thermal analysis, pressure and humidity analysis, and tile flow measurements, companies can develop heat removal calculations that quantify the benefits of specific mechanical and structural changes.

4. Reducing Ongoing Power Consumption

Companies can follow certain best practices to optimize their ongoing storage and server environment. One area to analyze is storage consumption, (since) data de-duplication software can help companies identify and eliminate redundant information that can occupy as much as 95% of total storage volumes. Companies should also examine backup processes to determine how smaller snapshots can be used instead of full volume clones and mirrors to reduce the requirements for operational data copies. Similarly, companies can use server virtualization technologies to reduce the number of physical servers needed and improve the overall server utilization rate. By refreshing any end-of-life technology with newer, energy-efficient server and storage platforms that support server virtualization and networked storage tiers, companies can improve overall efficiency even further.

Delivering the benefits of a green data centre strategy should not be an IT-only problem. Structural, maintenance and mechanical considerations must be combined with technology to determine the best solution. An incremental investment in outside resources with the specialized knowledge, tools and methodologies to perform power and cooling efficiency analyses, server virtualization, information classification, consolidation, tiering, et cetera, often pays for itself in lowered operating costs and improved capital efficiencies. Their expertise can be instrumental in helping companies execute a successful green data centre strategy that extends the life of existing data centre assets without breaking the capital budget in the process.