ByteandSwitch reports on a user group presentation.
ORLANDO, Fla. -- IT managers need to claw through the hype surrounding Green IT if they want to get their power costs under control, according to users here today.
”Talking green is easy, but being green is difficult,” warned Dave Vellante, senior storage analyst at the Wikibon research and user group, during a presentation this morning. “Smart companies can cut through the hype.”
Even technologies such as de-dupe, thin provisioning, and virtual storage, which are increasingly touted as a way to slash power and storage space costs, are no silver bullet, according to Vellante. “They are all tactics to improve utilization, but they do not solve the underlying problem. I would say that about 3 percent of the people that we speak to have visibility into what energy costs are in their data centers. Until that changes, it will be difficult to change the problem.”
A slew of vendors, including IBM, Xyratex, and 3PAR, are pushing technologies that aim to reduce data center power consumption, but Vellante urged users to get back to data center basics.
Focusing all your attention on servers, storage, and other IT equipment is not the way to go, according to the analyst. “If you just start there, you are missing a big opportunity,” he said, urging users to instead focus their initial efforts around legacy kit, cooling, air movement, and even lighting.
This is a good article for common sense approach to Greening the Data Center.
Focusing all your attention on servers, storage, and other IT equipment is not the way to go, according to the analyst. “If you just start there, you are missing a big opportunity,” he said, urging users to instead focus their initial efforts around legacy kit, cooling, air movement, and even lighting.
”Get rid of old stuff, turn things off [and] do simple power management. Clear out the data centers, use hot and cold aisles, use outside air [and] use water.”
These sentiments were echoed by Vellante’s co-presenter William Souder, the chief information security office at Berry College in Mount Berry, Ga. “It’s really simple, you walk the data center, you look behind your racks, you look for cable management [and] you look for your hot spots. Understand that it’s the simple things that get you there.”
Even the term "green computing" is misleading, according to Souder: “I don’t really call it green. You have to be a good steward about your spending anyway, and look to save money.”
This is not the first time that users have been urged to use common sense before spending big bucks on the latest, greatest, piece of "green technology," although it seems that relatively few IT managers even have an environmental policy in place for their data center.