October 4th, 2009
Gartner research suggests data center energy metrics still mystery to many businesses
Sometimes I feel like I’m beating a dead horse with these blogs, especially when reporting the results of ongoing Green IT research.
The latest disheartening report, for me at least, is the declaration by Gartner that along close to 70 percent of data center managers say that managing energy consumption is their most important Green IT issue, very few — just 7 percent — are pushing their vendors on energy efficiency OR implementing green procurement policies.
I guess it’s another instance of easier said than done. What is especially baffling to me, though are two things. First, there continues to be a real money-saving proposition in Green IT, although it’s over a matter of months not minutes. I guess short-term penny watchers are winning here. Second, data center about 63 percent of the data center who talked to Gartner are facing capacity constraints in their data center over the next 18 months. So, they’ve actually got a deadline against which they really need to do something.
Here’s the release from Gartner, which contains some links for a report that contains more of the data. And here are four things that its energy management analyst, Rakesh Kumar, suggests doing right away to ease into things:
- Turn up the temperature in your data center to between 71 degrees and 75 degrees Fahrenheit (24 degrees Celsius) in order to use less cooling
- Understand the implications of running your infrastructure at certain levels and create a dashboard that will give you better visibility
- Run the SPECpower energy efficiency benchmark on your servers
- Look into consolidation and virtualization
Heather Clancy is an award-winning business journalist in the New York area with more than 20 years experience covering the high-tech industry. See her full profile and disclosure of her industry affiliations. See her full profile and disclosure of her industry affiliations.
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