Data centers design and management need updated

http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&taxonomyId=154&articleId=9025860&intsrc=hm_topic

Take the case of Dan Wilson, IT operations manager at Osram Sylvania in Danvers, Mass. Getting an updated electrical bill prompted his data center redesign. “We were being charged a prorated amount that had been determined several years before that no one had ever updated internally when energy costs rose,” Wilson says. “When accounting did upgrade it, we said ‘Oh wait, they are hitting us with a real bill now.’ The [amount] came as a shock to us.”

Check out this article, its got some interesting comments about energy efficiency of the data center. Interestingly its when the data centers have been reaching capacity that many people I’ve spoken too have only started to begin to understand the cost of the data center and its significance to the business.
Before it was a hidden or sunk cost; that we paid £2 million a year for our data center operations, that nobody could break down the individual cost of the server, that business lines costs against another’s, and it didn’t really matter. It’s was a fixed cost, one that IT had to pay, and got back through ‘cross charging’ but typically in a volume fixed cost basis, that I charged you a hosting fee to cover the £2 million, but not the true operational costs.

As we buy in the data center, or procure a new data center, we see the significance of the cost of it, that it’s a valueable asset. With this in mind, I’m not trying to increase revenues, I’m trying to create incentives for more energy efficient systems, to prevent RISK from moving their DEC’s into the new data center, to say to the business, sure you can buy those high performance systems, but from a hosting standpoint, that operationally will be more expensive to support, to host than the Sun T1000, or the x86 lower energy processor based systems. This is increasingly important as I, as IT have to be more transparent, more efficient in the way I charge, to show that we can supply IT just as competitively as an outsourced solution.

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