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Business Green

Datacentre consultancy Migration Solutions has today unveiled a new Environmental Report and Audit (ERA) service that it claims will help firms better assess the full environmental impact of their server farms.

The company said that the new ERA service will be based on more than 120 different data points from across a company’s datacentre operations, including energy use, cooling requirements, building design, waste levels, procurement policies and carbon emissions.

Firms that undertake the audit will then receive a prioritised action plan offering advice on how they can they can limit their operation’s environmental impact and energy bills, and the likely financial costs of such moves.

The new service enters an increasingly crowded market place that has seen a number of high profile IT companies such as IBM and HP launch similar green datacentre auditing and consultancy services in recent months.

Additionally, industry-wide groups such as the US-based Green Grid are working on their own standardised metrics to help datacentre managers better assess the energy efficiency of their facilities.

I can certainly see why customers might want to get an analysis of their data center or their server farms. Understanding what you have, what operational constraints there are in terms of power and cooling, are the first steps in establishing what savings/improvements can be made in your business. Once we know what servers we have, what is running what applications, we can then determine which systems/applications would be in scope if we implemented specific changes, replacing any legacy servers, consolidating storage shelves on to SAN etc. It’s the little changes on a large scale that can be just as effective as the large scale projects – one of my colleagues was telling me how it might be cheaper simply to refesh your servers and run the data center a few degrees hotter, than to upgrade all your cooling and re-design your data center.

We’ll have to see, how you react will depend on a number of factors, but do speak with people, see what recommendations they have, where your data center, your business is and go from there.

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