TrendPoint offers four-prong attack to greening your datacenter
Devising an energy budget and measuring datacenter efficiency among key strategies
Follow @tsamson_IWDatacenter operators struggling to cut energy costs and to reduce their carbon emissions in anticipation of environmental regulations need an action plan, a point made this week by TrendPoint Systems. A provider of energy management solutions, the company unveiled a four-prong plan of attack to tackle the aforementioned issues. Although the plan doubles as a pitch for the company's product line, there's certainly sound advice to be found within.
1. Set an energy budget. "In the same way that companies set and manage travel and other line-item budgets, datacenters need to be able to set energy and carbon budgets that can be broken down among users, departments and sites," suggests TrendPoint. "Companies can then set budgets and give each user access to manage their individual energy and carbon usage against assigned metrics. Colocation facilities, in particular, need to be able to provide each customer with the ability to manage their own energy and carbon usage and to provide a system to bill back customers appropriately."
One company embracing this strategy is Microsoft. The company has devised an internal datacenter monitoring program called Scry. The system gathers all sorts of data on energy usage, temperature, carbon emissions, and more from all of Microsoft's datacenters. It also ties in to the company's asset management, ticketing, and CMDB (configuration management database) systems. The company uses the system to charge business units for the specific datacenter resources they use.
According to Microsoft, the approach has compelled employees to find ways to reduce energy consumption through techniques such as writing trimmer code.
[For more about Microsoft's Scry system, please read "Microsoft developers trim code to cut costs internally."]
2. Virtualize servers. "Companies can reap instant savings by consolidating underutilized data servers onto virtual machines on a physical server," according to TrendPoint. Indeed, InfoWorld has seen example after example of organizations reaping significant savings in energy consumption as well as floor space thanks to virtualization.
