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Looking Forward: Power, Cooling, and the Data Centre

Where energy efficiency meets cost efficiency

Although initiatives in the marketplace vary in their impact, we believe that the players who can provide dynamic realtime monitoring and control of the power consumption and cooling envelopes will be the long-term winners in this space. At present HP probably has the most comprehensive offering; however, other vendors certainly have many requisite pieces of the puzzle and one cannot overlook the expertise of IBM’s Global Services to pull together just about any solution given enough money. At a minimum, a combination of systems management, facilities management, myriad sensors, and realtime data acquisition and control software will be required to achieve enhanced data centre power and cooling efficiency. In addition, the knowledge, planning, and wherewithal to pull this together cannot be underestimated. But despite the higher barrier to entry to play effectively in this space, we believe the opportunity is too great for most systems or management vendors to overlook.

For systems management vendors such as HP, IBM, BMC, CA and others, the myriad sensors necessary to monitor environmental conditions represent an opportunity to extend management solutions to reach beyond the traditional bounds of IT. The dividing line between IT and facilities is clearly blurring in the data centre. This disruption in thinking highlights the latent opportunity. We expect to see more initiatives where vendors such as Sun, VMware, EMC, IBM, et al will work with utilities to implement creative programs to help organizations reduce data centre power consumption. Besides reducing the power bill, the reduced demand for data centre power forestalls the need for additional generation capacity on the power grid and is a win-win scenario for the utility and ratepayers alike. In addition, environmental factors such as air quality and ambient noise levels will likely emerge as drivers as well, as organizations rationalize and change how they approach office/work space internally.

Organizations will reap these benefits incrementally as they refresh their technology over its lifecycle, and in some cases, the savings might encourage earlier refresh of equipment that may still be functional, but less efficient. Of course, a significant upgrade of the data centre as a whole would bring more ROI sooner. If power utilities were to embrace power savings programs for computer technologies, like many do with older household appliances, lighting, heating, and cooling equipment, the potential to enhance the energy efficiency of the data centre would grow significantly. Hopefully, in 2007 this is exactly the kind of market place behavior we will see as chipmakers, drive manufacturers, systems vendors, storage specialists, systems management companies, and utilities all work towards improving the efficiency of the physical operation of the data centre.

Copyright © 2007, IT-Analysis.com

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