Making sense out of turning your data center green.
At the end of this summer, Prentice Hall published Marty Poniatowski’s Foundations of Green IT, a book on designing energy efficient data centers. The volume is a comprehensive discussion of consolidation, virtualization, efficiency and ROI in the data center. If you want to take a free peek at the book, you can check it out at Bitpipe.com.
While pressure continues to increase on data center managers to make their facilities greener, many shops don’t have a handle on the benefits of doing so. In his preface to the book, Poniatowski, who is chief technology officer managing all pre-sales and consulting technical experts at Computer Design and Integration, offers several compelling reasons for greening the data center:
- For every dollar spent on hardware, 50 cents is spent on power and cooling. This number has increased consistently over the last several years, and this is no doubt one of the primary drivers for virtualization and consolidation.
- The average data center is 52 percent utilized and 1/3 of data centers are approaching maximum floor space capacity.
- The average rack is 56 percent utilized and 1/3 of data centers are approaching maximum rack space density.
Poniatowski argues that the number one challenge for the data center manager is power and cooling. Power and cooling shortages, he writes, cause server or storage downtime in 49 percent of all data centers.
A substantial amount of the power consumed by data centers can be reduced —as much as 25 to 30 percent—by virtualization. That’s important when one considers that the financial outlay for powering data centers has doubled since 2000 at a cost of some $4.1 billion.
