Console management can help IT leaders respond to environmental laws

Paying the energy bill can be a major strain on IT budgets, especially as technology needs expand across many sectors. If you're running a legacy data center, in particular, you've probably run into a situation in which you want to addcapacity, but the cost associated with supporting that much power demand is just too much to deal with. These costs could soon get even higher, as new laws are emerging that could punish IT leaders that aren't running energy-efficient data centers.

According to a recent Network World report, California recently developed a greenhouse gas emissions law that could be the forerunner of similar guidelines around the world. The end result could be a punitive cost scenario that forces IT managers to rethink data center efficiency strategies.

Looking at California's emissions law
The news source explained that the new greenhouse gas emissions law is targeting power generation sites as the area where efficiency improvements are necessary. The goal, in California, is to reduce emissions caused by power generation to 1990 levels by 2020. Significant financial ramifications have been put in place for organizations that cause power generation sites to use create large amounts of electricity. This could leave IT managers paying especially high energy bills if they are unable to improve their own efficiency capabilities.

The report explained that California's law is an early example of what could soon happen in many states around the United States. President Obama, working with the Environmental Protection Agency, has set a national goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

Developing a more efficient data center setup
Establish more energy-efficient data center architectures can be challenging, especially for companies that face significant budget limitations and legacy facilities that limit upgrade options. In many cases, the best methods to improve sustainability in the data center is to develop better ways to manage and maintain the facility to avoid wasted power caused by inefficiencies that last over time. For example, if a hot spot develops, cooling systems have to work harder to keep everything under control. The end result is a situation in which excess power is used.

Console servers allow IT managers to adjust the configuration and manage systems remotely, allowing them to deal with problems as easily as possible. As a result, the amount of time that hot spots go without attention and similar problems are left unaddressed is minimized and the data center can operate much more sustainably.

Perle's wide range of 1 to 48 port Perle Console Servers provide data center managers and network administrators with secure remote management of any device with a serial console port. Plus, they are the only truly fault tolerant Console Servers on the market with the advanced security functionality needed to easily perform secure remote data center management and out-of-band management of IT assets from anywhere in the world.