The green data center and the need to plan for now and for the future

E commerce times

In today’s world of hybrid cars and wind farms, consuming energy wisely is on every individual’s agenda. Companies and their IT departments should be no different. Statistics aside, there is no doubt that collectively data centers have a huge “carbon footprint” and are the biggest or one of the biggest consumers of energy in every company. You have already heard about how it is only a matter of time until companies will be forced to make data centers green as a part of their effort to reduce their carbon penalty. If you think this issue is going away, think again.

How you plan your data center strategy in the short and long term will depend on your business and IT needs, but going forward we should be looking at not only the technologies, the air flow, the server, the storage and the network, but the business applications, the mapping of resources and applications to business processes and business needs:

• What is core to our business – what do we absolutely need online now and forever and what can we work without
• What level of availability is needed around our business – does our IT need 24/7 or 9-5?
• How can we be more efficient with the IT with the data center – what can we do to work with what we have, do all the servers need dual power supplies – can we virtualize or decommission – can we consolidate roles and outsource or buy in the services that aren’t core?
• What steps in the build, in the configuration of the servers can be taken to improve their efficiencies and reduce costs, support or in terms of energy efficiency.
• What steps in data center design for example in air flow and the distribution of cooling can be made to improve where we are – is the cooling efficiently distributed, are we cooling too much of one area and missing other parts?
  

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