US Data Centers May Be Forced To Green Their Operations: They're Running Out Of Space And Looking For A Reason To Expand
by John Laumer, Philadelphia on 09.20.07
ONStor, Inc., the leading provider of scalable clustered NAS solutions for the enterprise, today announced results from an independent survey of 369 IT decision makers regarding the status of the "greening" of their data centers. Sixty-three percent [63%] of the respondents reported that their data center had run out of space, power or cooling capacity without warning.
Another alarming statistic was that although the power consumption of an enterprise's data center is massive, 40 percent of respondents have not discussed a green initiative within their company; 60 percent reported that they had a green initiative in place, would have one in place in the next two years, or had at least talked about it with management.
Other significant results from the survey:-- At their current data growth rate, 43 percent of respondents
could stay in their current infrastructure for only six months
to one year if they changed nothing-- 24 percent reported that the cost and time of building another
data center is the most serious issue driving the reduction of
data infrastructure power consumption-- Nearly 40 percent would go green if doing so resulted in 20-50
percent cost savings-- More than one third would go green for 10-20 percent cost
savings-- Half of respondents favor service-level agreements (SLAs) and
chargebacks to IT disciplines for power and capacity
consumption, but only half of them either have implemented these
policies or know they will be doing so-- 11 percent report interest in creating a chief energy officer
position in their organization
TreeHugger comment: If I were in the supply chain for data center construction and capital equipment that was more energy efficient, I would be getting ready for a major marketing push.
Via: ONStor, ONStor Green Data Center Survey Reveals 63 Percent of Organizations Have Run Out of Space, Power, or Cooling Capacity Without Warning. Image credit::High Tech News
Interesting take on what is becoming a significant problem. What does everyone think about the recent EPA report on this subject (http://www.energystar.gov/index.cfm?c=prod_development.server_efficiency_study)? Seems like data center power usage could double again by 2011, yikes! There are some companies already planning ahead, like green data storage provider Nexsan (http://www.nexsan.com), which uses only 25 percent as much energy as its competitors. Hopefully we'll see more of this.
yep, the closest 2 datacentres to me have run out of power capacity but have free physical space. One is desperately trying to decomission as much as possible to bring down the power usage, as the UPS/Generator may not cope with a blackout.
The problem is they have been pulling out less powerful computers and replacing them with super-dense Blades and multi-CPU beasts that are draining power. The enterprise applications, nowadays, are multi-tiered and built for redundancy and several tiers for development/testing. The vendors figure tin is cheap.
I didn't read about virtualisation in the above article. I work in IT support contracting in Brisbane, Australia and a lot of the places I have worked are using virtual servers (in particular, VMWare) to take advantage of unused physical space, but use no extra power consumption. Many servers on 1 physical machine, but the network doesn't know the difference. I'm looking at specialising in VMWare to become a guru in this field, in line with my values of attempting to be as green as possible. At work it's great being able to test out new software on a virtual machine with no consequences if anything goes wrong. Even tape backups are now virtual in many places I've been. Cheers!
Have to agree that virtualization is the one shining hope - we have over 50 machines doing singular tasks that can't be interupted by other tasks.
We started migrating now to VMware and are jazzed about the possibilities and a chance for a little more greeness.
Since you refer to virtual servers, I am inclined to say that ONStor themselves have virtualization capabilities in their NAS boxes. In fact, we have an ONStor NAS cluster on which we have up to 10 virtual servers running. The vservers are great in that they look and feel like regular NAS servers. It is pretty cool what they have done.
VF