Managing the data center demand/supply

http://itmanagement.earthweb.com/netsys/article.php/3740516

MENLO PARK, CALIF. – It’s time to raise the raised floors and get serious about energy savings in the datacenter. That was one of the messages Subodh Bapat, a distinguished engineer and vice president of eco-responsibility at Sun, gave here Thursday during an open house for its Sun Labs group.

With growing energy costs, space constraints and growing computer processing and storage needs, large companies are under more pressure than ever to save money and keep IT operations efficient. Bapat noted, for example, that the social network Facebook’s datacenter is growing at a rate of about three percent per week.

While most companies may not have the happy problem of Facebook’s runaway growth, they still have to deal with energy constraints and costs. Bapat detailed a number of suggestions Sun has itself implemented as well as its customers and partners.

Check out this article, it raises some relevant comments about energy efficiency in the data center. It’s not just about the green message, of being energy efficient, it’s about protecting your business interests, avoiding the watt in/watt out scenario. It need not be disruptive to your business, analyzing what you can do within your business/operational or data center constraints, contacting the stakeholders - your customer, ‘the business’ and saying, “this is where we are”, this is what we could achieve with little investment, for example by deploying 8 midrange servers we can virtualize and replace 64 1u rack servers, saving so much in power/cooling etc. Pre-emptively managing demand/supply, and keeping everyone on the same track. We can’t do it overnight, but with simple inventory reports, analysis the small steps, you’d be surprised how much you can achieve  - do all the development servers really need their second power supply connected and powered?