What are the Top 10 Benefits of a Green Data Center?

As many of you know most companies are sitting on the fence as to whether a Green Data Center Initiative is worth the effort. To help you persuade the people who think this is a fad let me go over some benefits I've observed for those who run Green Data Centers.

  1. There is pride in the Data Center team as they are leaders in the industry.

  2. They are saving money on their power bills now vs. their competitors who are paying more and doing less with power constrained data centers and under utilized equipment.

  3. They are moving on to the next steps of building energy efficient solutions on energy efficient infrastructure.

  4. They are questioning standard practices to see if there are different ways to run servers in a data center. When you look in the big picture the way each server is designed in isolation, you wonder what would happen if power, memory, IO, storage was a shared resource across multiple servers.

  5. As the internal PR teams realize they have a green initiative hiding in their data centers, they are promoting the environmental friendly activities.

  6. Capacity Planning becomes a lot easier given there is awareness that power and cooling are critical resources to be proactively managed.

  7. Charge back models are changed to report actual power consumption by business units, giving the business units incentives to develop energy efficient solutions.

  8. They already have carbon emission monitoring systems in place , and have no fear when it is government regulatory requirement.

  9. They know a lower TCO is a benefit of a sustainable solution.

  10. They evaluate hardware from vendors in a way that cuts through the marketing hype, and addresses the bottom line.

Part of my inspiration for this article is sitting in an area this weekend with plentiful hydroelectric power, but connected to the Internet with 1 bar of cel phone reception when I go to the highest part of the house with the cel phone resting on the highest shelf in the room. So minimal bits is part of the economizing.  Being Green is all about the best use of your resources.