By Dr. Albert Esser

Business decision makers have been relatively slow to embrace environmentally friendly practices, mistakenly assuming that they must subject their companies to similar sacrifices-that "greening" their companies is costly, and thus bad for business. Most businesses want to adopt green practices but the perception that going green means spending more often stops them from adopting environmentally friendly alternatives. Such assumptions couldn’t be further from the truth.

If done smartly, adopting green business practices can help achieve higher profitability and efficiency. And nowhere are the potential benefits of a green strategy more compelling than in the data centre. Consider that according to a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency report, data centre power consumption stands at 1.5 per cent of total power consumption in the U.S. and is expected to double by 2011.

Though Canada does not have as many hyper-scale data centres as the U.S., power consumption is still a big concern for corporations. The increased proliferation of servers and the resulting need for facilities that provide the necessary electricity and cooling capacity pose numerous challenges for IT managers at Canadian facilities. There is a growing need to identify avenues to conserve power while improving efficiencies and reducing costs.

A green strategy can help data centre operators "unlock a hidden data centre" within their existing facilities with a recipe for power and cooling that can prove to be a solid investment not only in the environment, but in their businesses as well. Unlocking a hidden data centre can be accomplished by adopting a few strategies that are likely to reduce power costs, as well as improve server efficiency and performance.

One good place to start is upgrading to power-efficient servers. For instance, at Dell we know that choosing an energy-efficient blade server versus a similarly configured system from another vendor can deliver power savings of up to $2,600 for one rack of servers. And each rack of these same blade servers can help reduce CO2 emissions by 18 tonnes a year. Imagine the savings if you take into account an entire data centre. A customer’s up-front investment for more energy-efficient servers can typically be offset within months by the energy cost savings.

Still, simply modernizing servers won’t address utilization rates that are estimated to be as low as 25 per cent per server industry-wide. And having a data centre filled with under-used servers means a lot of wasted energy that could be channeled towards many other operations. Deploying virtualization software allows each server to run multiple applications and has become an increasingly popular approach for squeezing more out of existing servers. Virtualization also has a significant impact on power consumption. A server running at a 10 per cent load, for instance, requires two-thirds the power of a full load; increasing the load to 80 per cent increases the power requirement by just 20 per cent.

Virtualization also enables data centre operators to further benefit from server consolidation, allowing them to use a single server to run multiple applications that previously required multiple dedicated servers. In fact, this is one of the cornerstones for unlocking your hidden data centre, as it results in servers running closer to capacity. It not only has little or no impact on power or cooling, but can even reduce demand for those resources.

Additional gains in the greening effort can be achieved through deployment of advanced power and cooling solutions. While newer power supplies and air conditioning equipment are part of the puzzle, a strategic analysis of the power and cooling infrastructure is critical to getting the full benefit. In that case, an IT vendor’s services team can help analyze the physical layout of the power and cooling systems and suggest ways to get more out of existing resources.

There are also other indirect factors businesses should consider as they weigh whether to green their data centres. For instance, because data centres are such huge consumers of power, a greener data centre means a greener facility and company. It demonstrates to employees, customers, shareholders and other observers that the organization is environmentally responsible. There’s also potential for the IT department to shed its reputation as a cost centre. IT can actually emerge from a greening effort to be lauded as a major contributor to the bottom line thanks to its newfound ability to provide more efficient technology at a lower cost.

In addition, the act of greening data centres forces businesses to pay closer attention to not just what their data centres produce, but also what they consume. So, to borrow a driving analogy, instead of looking at sheer horse power, an organization will be compelled to consider the miles per gallon it gets from its data centre as it attempts to stretch its watts. Ultimately, the business will cut its operational costs by reducing what it spends on electricity and running its IT department, and capital expenditures also will drop as the result of lower costs related to power and cooling equipment.

So, the decision to green a data centre is really an easy one. The perception that doing so will prove to be an expensive undertaking that benefits the environment but hurts a company’s bottom line quite simply misses the mark. The truth is, if your data centre isn't green, you’re wasting your money. Or, more to the point, greening your data centre will help you to get further into the black. And those are terms any executive team can appreciate.

Dr. Albert Esser is vice-president of data centre infrastructure at Dell.

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