Lewis Curtis at Microsoft has thrown out his 2008 predictions and below I have highlights. Many of these same ideas have been discussed by Christian Belady, Microsoft's new Power and Cooling architect who was hired from HP. I'll see if we can get Christian to make his own 2008 predictions.
Prediction one:
2008 is the year that more realize Green IT is not a passing fad in the industry, More will realize that Green IT is a permanent regulatory and operational reality in IT Architecture and Operations and it cannot be ignored. Regulations and oversight as well as public scrutiny will increase in 2008 (as well as poor metrics in power consumption and carbon footprint). We will see more laws and regulations, more audits, around the world.
Prediction Two:
Companies who only rely on performance per watt (ppw) justifications for capital expenditures will see their power consumption increase (you read it right).
ppw has been a mainstay for vendors to justify new hardware and software it sells to IT organizations for the last thirty years.
The logic goes like this:
"your (server/SAN/network/database/operating system) can do more work with the same amount of power, therefore, you will need fewer of them, hence you can reduce your power bill"
Most Vendors are still parading the ppw marketing plan as their green answer today.
So why doesn’t this argument work in the real world? Answer: because it never factors in its impact on the velocity of demand as well as the impact of the environment which must now support it.
As technology capability increases, the velocity of people's demands of that technology will increase more. Therefore the demand for more servers, storage and network capability will increase. This, in turn, will increase the demand for power. This does not mention the cooling efficiency challenges of power dense racks (accounting for a substantial percentage of datacenter's power budget).
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