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BroadGroup Summarise Findings From Power and Cooling 2008 The 2nd BroadGroup Power and Cooling summit, held in London on 4-5 October, was a great success, and built substantially on the first event in 2006. Over 200 attendees came to the event, and many stayed to the end of Day 2 to hear the final workshop on green data centres. Attendees came from a wide variety of roles, companies and countries, illustrating the enormous interest in this topic. Many of the exhibitors reported closing business during the two days, highlighting the fact that many attendees were senior management and decision makers. Summarizing the event is no easy task, as there was a wide variety of views, experiences and strategies around power and cooling. Overall conclusions included: 1. Power and cooling is a far broader issue than just the data centre. It needs to be considered at a corporate and board level, and regulation and legislation is likely to ensure this. Innovative corporates are already making power spending an element of the CTO/CIO bonus package. 2. There is some ‘low hanging fruit’ to improve power and broader data centre efficiency. This includes switching off unused equipment, raising data centre temperatures (25 degrees was suggested), IT and data centre audits, and server virtualization. 3. There are some new metrics and benchmarks for data centre power and cooling efficiency, including those from ASHRAE and Uptime Institute. This includes power usage effi ciency (IT power/input power). Vendors such as IBM and HP offer tool sets, and new standards and vendor groupings will offer more advanced metrics. 4. Improving power and cooling efficiency beyond the simple steps is not easy. In one casestudy, the user reduced their number of servers from 1,400 to 800, but the power requirement only fell by 15%. There are many conflicting claims and views as to where power and cooling efficiencies are lost, and many new vendor offerings and technologies which make over-optimistic claims on their ability to help solve the problem. 5. Government and regulatory moves in the area may be clumsy and confused. The industry needs to work hard to ensure that government and regulators understand the issues. 6. To make a step change in power and cooling efficiency, it is critical to take a holistic approach to data centres, and not just focus on one or two technology areas. The challenge is also as much cultural/organizational, as technological, and data centre planning must become integral to broader IT strategy. 7. A final thought was that power and cooling, and efficiency metrics, is very much a moving target. As one speake r put it, “today’s problems are yesterday’s solutions.”
Have you also seen our other consultant articles? Too Much
Greenwash?
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