Green Data Center: Efficient Power Management

By Author: Martin Lobo
Total Articles: 355
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Power is a limited resource and the modern day data centers are working towards efficient power management. The objective is to reduce the carbon footprints. This objective is prevalent in almost every corporate sector as the ultimate aim is to operate in an eco-friendly manner. In the recent past, the data center community has been looking for innovative methods for efficient functioning that contributes to sustainability.

The main objective towards establishing a green data center efficiency project is to achieve a baseline on the concerned platforms for enterprises to be able analyze the development and report the result. Irrespective, of whether you are focusing on data center hosting, consolidation or virtualization, or improving the PUE you would need to have a clear understanding about which equipment is utilizes power and the amount being consumed.

Leading solution providers have introduced well integrated and phased processes for a green datacenter set up. The solution offer ...
... sustainability, are cost-efficient and ensures a stable bottom-line for an enterprise. The phases are:

The Assessment Phase
This phase helps in setting up a baseline of the carbon footprint and energy usage of the present platform by using an assessment structure provided by the service provider that used for auditing the existing platform. This is followed by the GAP analysis and feasibility study for identifying transformational activities, conduct impact analysis and estimate the cost format.

The Designing and Planning Phase
This stage helps in developing a route map for specific Green IT initiatives such as DC optimization, procurement, resource and financial planning and recycling.

The Implementation Phase
This stage helps in choosing and executing technologies for data center virtualization, consolidation, power and cooling management. This phase also works towards enabling an enterprise to achieve LEED certification.

While setting up a Green Data Center environment, effective data center consolidation and virtualizing offers great scope for increase in efficiency and space. For benefiting truly from consolidation, it is important to take apart those servers that are not contributing to the business. As you do that, eminent solution providers would advise you to spot and note all the remaining servers having less than 10 percent for consolidation. In addition to that, if you can consolidate ten to thirty servers within a single one, you can use and function the datacenter seamlessly. Furthermore, it is crucial to appraise the power consumption once consolidation has taken place, in order to evaluate the same to the baseline and cooling consumption.


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