Greening the data centre

Johannesburg, 19 Jun 2009

Managing power utilisation is imperative in improving data centre efficiency, says Richard Sutherland, product manager of dynamic infrastructure at Fujitsu, who will speak at the ITWeb Green IT Summit, taking place at The Forum, Bryanston, on 18 August.

The summit is designed for senior IT, technology, procurement and strategic planning executives tasked with managing the energy consumption and cost implications of IT within their organisations.

Executives will learn how to make their data centres eco-friendly, bringing major company benefits and putting them ahead of the environmental trend.

Sutherland will examine best practices for reducing energy consumption and costs in the data centre and detail how energy is distributed through the data centre. He will also discuss green IT challenges, as well as areas of consumption and saving energy in corporate IT.

Best practices

Sutherland points out that advanced power management, to control and optimise idle power utilisation in the data centre, is vital for enhancing data centre energy efficiency.

He adds that infrastructure standardisation with emphasis on newer technologies can help, as their advanced designs are focused on energy efficiency.

“Companies can adopt consulting services to improve power utilisation efficiency with advanced layout, power provisioning and cooling concepts in data centre physical designs,” says Sutherland.

Other approaches to reducing data centre energy use include system management and advanced hardware technology, to optimise standby or hibernation, as well as low power sizing options in the office, according to Sutherland.

Advanced technology that optimises performance per watt and enables dynamic provisioning in the data centre is also useful. This includes technologies such as virtualisation, which increases utilisation rates in consolidated application environments.

Hardware considerations

Sutherland says for an organisation to maintain or grow data processing and storage capacity while reducing energy costs, it has to consider all IT equipment, not just that in the data center. This could involve advanced system management - leveraging power control and ultra-low sleep modes built into the hardware.

Sutherland points out that deploying system sizing (small servers) is crucial for organisations aiming to grow data processing and storage volumes while lowering energy consumption.

”Consider investing in newer technologies as their designs are energy efficient as well as deploying technologies that increase hardware utilisation,” he adds.

Since green issues are gaining attention in the IT sphere and impacting on the way organisations approach their data centres, the ITWeb Green IT Summit could bring important insights to companies, especially during the economic downturn.