Today’s business executives are concerned not only with the growing costs of energy to run and cool data centers, but also with presenting a green corporate image in today’s era of heightened environmental awareness. The data center has become a major energy consumer on the corporate balance sheet. At the same time, many IT organizations are facing a multidimensional crisis that is the first of its kind in the history of information processing. These companies are experiencing a virtual explosion of information to process and store as energy costs soar to record levels. More energy efficient data centers can help reduce
environmental impact while curbing IT costs.
The amount of energy consumed by data centers is not to be underestimated. Information storage is one of the fastest growing technologies in today’s data center, driven by ever-expanding volumes of business information. Improving data center efficiency by 20% would save 36 billion kwh of electricity; the equivalent of 22 million tons of carbon dioxide—or the amount of CO2 emitted by 4.2 million passenger cars—according to the U.S. Climate Technology Cooperation Gateway.
In terms of energy consumption, IT managers need to look at the costs of both the physical data center and the IT infrastructure. In some cases, the opportunity to realize significant energy savings involves either upgrading existing data centers or building new ones. Since the IT infrastructure in many data centers is replaced every two to four years, addressing green initiatives as new equipment comes in will prevent older data centers from exceeding powering and cooling capacities—one reason why building or upgrading the data center can be an important stepping stone on the path to a greener organization.
Data center overhauls are not always possible, but you can gradually change your infrastructure over time. Many vendors like IBM and HP offers hardware and software storage solutions that can bring significant savings in energy costs through virtualized servers and storage equipment. As an added benefit your storage virtulaization plans can also include improved performance, compliance, data security, and disaster protection, as well as reduced total cost of ownership and energy costs.
IBM teamed up with the Enterprise Strategy Group to create a white paper on green business initiatives which focuses on many aspect of virtualization including storage. You can down load the white paper here or visit IBM Go Green.
Consolidation through virtualization technologies and techniques will result in better utilization of all your resources, including servers, storage, networks and applications. In essence, storage virtualization is a great area to begin and can be a key part of your overall drive to meet green requirements and operational efficiency.
Posted under Data Center, Data Center Virtualization, Green IT, Storage Virtualization, Virtualization Strategies, White Paper, virtualization
This post was written by admin on October 30, 2008
