BusinessWeek’s Steve Hamm recently wrote a
story on the growing issue of powering and cooling data centers, and what he calls the tech industry’s energy crisis. The article looks at the issue of energy efficient data centers on a very large scale and explores drastic measures, like relocating your company’s data center to Iceland. That's not the right solution for every company; in fact, the article concludes that this won’t be enough to solve the tech industry’s energy issues. Hamm makes a very valid point: every company, regardless of size, needs to start planning and implementing "greener" data center practices in order to stay competitive.
Here at Compellent, we’ve been addressing this issue since we first started developing our SAN. We know that everyone has to work with smaller staffs and budgets. They have to get their costs for purchasing, powering, cooling and managing data storage under control. We think the best way to do this is to get rid of unnecessary hardware from the data center — reduce disk drive counts and consolidate servers. One of our federal customers recently told me he needed to increase storage utilization and capacity to keep up with data growth but could neither expand the physical space nor increase the amount of electricity or cooling to support more resources. So he decided to virtualize his storage, use thin provisioning and automated tiered storage, and virtualize servers. We feel customers can green their data centers with technologies and techniques available to them today without having to go as far away as Iceland (though I'm sure it's a beautiful place)! We’d like to hear what you think – what are you doing to green your data center?