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Loading ...Some thoughts for you, from watching Cisco’s TechwiseTV today: ”Energy Efficiency in the Data Center“. The IT industry is getting hot on environmental issues, and rightly so. Vendors and customers alike were impacted by regulations such as RoHS and WEE. These deal with the cradle and the grave of IT kit. Now the spotlight is on the power consumed in between.
Last year Gartner put IT on a par with the airline industry for CO2 footprint (”Green IT: Why it matters” ZDNet). Environmental issues, driven by the Corporate Social Responsibility agenda, are making people to think hard about that power use. But using less energy also saves money, and that is good business sense as much as environmental sensitivity.
Energy is a big ticket item for IT. Cooling uses as much, or more, power as servers themselves, which is creating a spiraling demand. Virtualization has got a new lease of life, speaking a new coat of green paint. It reduces the number of servers and their power usage. VMWare’s Rob Smoot talked though server virtualisation, and also the benefits of virtualization for the desktop. Thin clients reduce power and extend desktop machines life. Sun was ahead of the times after all.
Robb Boyd quotes Doug Gourlay on the history of constraints: first we were space constrained, then cooling constrained and now we are power constrained. Rob Aldrich - Cisco’s Mr Green - focussed on efficiency and sustainability, putting ‘green’ to one side as a politically loaded term. A good point, and a neat angle to follow.
The number of apps and the amount of data will continue to grow (The Exploding Digital Universe). The slight curve ball is where cloud computing plays into this. However, that moves the problem, rather than fixes it. The fact is, it is time to look carefully at IT power consumption, if you aren’t already.
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