Presenter: Rakesh Kumar
Considering a data-centre as a living breathing dynamically changing organism.
Which critical forces will drive enterprise data-centre strategies during the next five years?
Tier one cities in on Europe and US are maxed-out—there is no capacity left for new data-centres.
Most immediate concern is server efficiency, cooling technologies, processor design, facilities design. In the next 2-5 years: assessing the green credentials of suppliers; PC power management; energy management tools. Longer term still—using alternative energy sources, recycling, data-centre heat recycling, carbon offsetting.
The green data-centre can't look only at the efficiency of the servers themselves—they take little of the energy (6%)—only 1% to the processor itself. Look at the whole data-centre, including cooling and so on. More and more processors are being packed into the same space that contained mainframes 30 years ago. New design envelop needs to see flexibility of cooling. Design in a modular way, with each module's design with a lifecycle of 3-5 years so that you can continue to take advantage of new technologies as you move forward.
What are the best practices and processes that users should follow when designing a green data centre?
Mixing chilling of different kinds: liquid, air. Looking at alternative energy sources for data-centres. Green data-centre can cost about 20% more. Recycling the air is worth considering. Green data-centre is highly monitored—thermal images, thermometers, power management tools.
Considering the data-centre as an organism makes us think about how the data-centre can respond to changing requirements—consider adding more server resources to Agresso in the approach to year-end.
There is research from Gartner that allows the comparison of servers vendor to vendor. Some vendors are more forthcoming than others. Look also at the software tools provided for power management. Consider waste management for the end-of-life for the assets.
Which key green technologies will help us design a green data centre?
Software for power and energy management, maybe just showing what energy consumption looks like (this is consistent with what Simon Mingay has been saying earlier in the week).
Virtualization, consolidation and utilization (again, making sure that every service is still being used).
Green Grid looks at data-centre efficiency: http://www.thegreengrid.org
Proposes KPIs for data-centre efficiency. Maybe we can look at their metrics (which are likely to become standards) to examine energy efficiency in our data centres.
Look also at Gartner "Green ICT Scorecard Model".
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