Go Green with an Energy Efficient Data Center and You'll Never Go Back

Going Green is Good Business Q&A with Rich Lechner, Vice President, Marketing & Strategy, Enterprise Systems, IBM
1. What is the reason why organizations should go green? Is it only to cut costs? The reason organizations today should go green often varies on an organization's goals, itself, whether it is most interested in financial gains, operational enhancements, or global/environmental issues. Many clients tell us that going green is simply good business. On one hand, monitoring and managing energy consumption throughout a business can lower its utility expenses. But it's not just about cutting costs. By going green and conserving energy, businesses can improve their operational efficiencies, themselves, striking a more optimal balance between what technology can do and what people can do. This often results in greater productivity internally, and enhanced business services for customers. But more important, as the business realizes these benefits from going green, its image within the company and beyond it are also often improved. From better employee morale in the office to increased brand awareness in the marketplace, the business benefits of energy conservation can be far-reaching. 2. What are the major issues involved in creating a green datacenter? CIOs and IT Managers usually become involved with creating a green datacenter because they find themselves in a situation where their datacenter is at maximum capacity, where they are running out of floor space or power or both! As they move toward a green datacenter, they need to maintain the quality and performance of the business services their datacenter is delivering to the business, itself, and to its customers. In many cases, their IT services really need to be available without disruption 24 x 7, and yet, they are unsure how to face growing demands with less power and floorspace. At the same time, many datacenters are old (re: Gartner study reporting that datacenters built before 2001 are considered obsolete...87% of them!) and ill-equipped to conserve energy (less than 10 kw per sq foot) so the issue of better asset utilization, management and replacement surfaces. The average utilization rate of servers is 10% so why not consolidate, virtualize, and move workloads more optimally around the datacenter? Are their systems generating excessive heat that could otherwise be dissipated significantly by going green? Chillers, alone, are perhaps the largest energy consumers in datacenters, at 30-35%. How much energy could be reduced if the typical air conditioning requirements could be offloaded by repositioning IT equipment into hot aisles, cool aisles, closer to the outside air? Is their infrastructure set up so IT staff can easily and quickly identify, isolate, and manage "hot" spots, where significant amounts of energy are expended due to system performance spikes during peak end-user traffic? 3. What impact does greening a datacenter have on TCO? When we think about TCO and a green datacenter, we think of impacting not only the total cost of ownership but also the total cost of operations. These days, energy-conserving technology, applications, and services for greening a datacenter are available to help lower TCO. Tools for measuring and managing energy use automatically are becoming much more prevalent. Our Active Energy Manager, for example, makes it possible to meter actual power usage and produce trend data across multiple systems automatically. It also can cap power use based on workloads and business trends to optimize energy use and application performance without sacrificing productivity. It can either prompt an IT staff person to take corrective action, or automatically make the correction itself, based on policies previously set up, thereby streamlining energy management operations and related costs. These kinds of proactive energy monitoring capabilities, along with automated IT asset identification and management from Tivoli, help automatically alert IT staff to "hotspots" not only in a datacenter but beyond it, too. In addition, when you combine these kinds of tools with live partition mobility of Power6, you can gain the ability to migrate workloads and eliminate hotspots while moving work off underutilized systems to conserve power. All in all, TCO can really look good when growing IT applications and services from the datacenter can be maximized without hitting power and cooling limitations. Leveragin... [download for more]