Before the recession, corporate green IT agendas were on target. When times got harder, green turned to red as cost cuts were made.
Organisations shelved their green strategies, but were missing a trick. They treated greenIT too much as an environmental gesture rather than an opportunity to do more with less. Most abolished or delayed their green strategy but are now further behind in a world that is increasingly regulatory around carbon reduction.
The datacentre is mission critical in delivering the massive computing power required to make organisations function effectively. Deliberations over a carbon-efficient or cost-efficient datacentre should not happen. With greater cooling efficiency the prime factor in both these goals, a single green and lean strategy is easily achievable.
Virtualisation has become the darling of the datacentre, offering a way of squeezing the most power out of existing resources and reducing latency. This, coupled with financial pressures, has been good for short-term efficiency. Virtualisation offers significant benefits but may stop firms exploring other ways of being lean and green in the long term.
Intelligent infrastructure management IIM is one way for organisations to maximise efficiencies across their datacentres through a precise and constantly updated inventory of how all the IT assets in the datacentre are being used and managed.
Datacentre managers and others benefit from IIM by knowing exactly what their energy costs or carbon emission rates are. IT resources can be audited by operations and business staff and informed decisions can be made about application deployment as the effects are made more transparent.
The trend towards virtualisation and in some cases environmental modelling is growing in UK datacentres. By converging cost cutting and green strategies, adopting effective datacentre design alongside virtualisation and refining the existing environment, datacentre managers can reap significant ROI and make a greener impact on the environment too.
Roddy Adams is technical account director at Redstone Converged Solutions