Bladewatch.com

http://www.cio.co.uk/concern/resources/features/index.cfm?articleid=620&pagtype=samecat

Companies in the midst of consolidating their data centres to save energy and cut costs are looking for some assistance in the form of standards.

Standards are needed for rating the energy efficiency of data centres and tools for monitoring energy consumption in multivendor environments, said speakers at the recent Green Grid Technical Forum.

In the US Allstate Insurance is consolidating four data centre to two. It is pursuing a silver rating from the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED), a standard set out by the US Green Building Council. The standard is for sustainable construction and Allstate hopes to reach silver with its second data centre, which will open in the spring of 2009. However “LEED is not designed for data centres, but focuses on commercial buildings with people in [them],” said Brandi L. Landreth, director of continuity management and data centre strategy at the insurance company. She called for a ratings standard that would specifically apply to data centres.

Check out this interesting article from CIO which is talking about the need for standards, best practices in the way we deploy and manage our data centers. It’s an important topic, particularly as data center space/power gets more limited, it’s cost, it’s political sensitivity increases.

What we need is the complete approach, transversal, across business lines. The data center teams need to know where equipment is racked, what power it uses, the cooling required etc, the server teams need an inventory, the business teams need this information for cross charging. Ultimately though what the business, the end user needs is the big picture taken. That a group or an individual is looking a this data and planning a course through issues where I can continue allocating space to new projects, maintaining service to existing systems, whilst achieving what we can within our current data center constraints. This might mean we switch to an application virtualization solution, something like FabricServer, or server virtualization, whatever works for your business.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.