Green IT invading the data center
Energy efficiency has emerged as a major priority in the data center industry, as sustainability goals merging with business requirements.
By Max BurkhalterApril 27, 2012
Energy efficiency is emerging as a major priority across the data center sector, as a recent Pike Research study found that sustainability efforts are paying off and more organizations are implementing energy efficient data center technologies to control power consumption.
According to the study, the global data center market is expanding at an unsustainable pace. The industry already uses 1.5 percent of the world's power, and emerging markets, such as Africa, the Asia-Pacific and many parts of South America and Eastern Europe are all experiencing rapid data center industry growth as more organizations build facilities in those regions. This is leading to something of a crisis around the world, as energy costs are rising, virtualization and cloud computing are leading to rapid expansion in the commercial market and many operators simply cannot afford to keep running their facilities while using as much power as they are currently consuming.
At the same time, environmentally conscious companies have already started bringing about change in the sector. The study found improved cooling technologies, more efficient power delivery systems and other data center sustainability tools are already beginning to pay dividends throughout the sector, with even more to be gained if a greater volume of operators implement green IT initiatives in their data centers.
Eric Woods, research director for Pike Research, explained that significant operational changes in the sector is making sustainability a key priority.
"The drive toward green data centers is a response to business requirements to reduce costs across the company as well as a response to environmental concerns. Within the data center environment, that translates to a mandate to reduce energy consumption, which in turn is driving innovation. Data center operators are exploring new ideas related to business models, facility construction, layout and design, air flow dynamics, new technology, and monitoring and management tools," said Woods.
For businesses looking to improve data center efficiency by simply reducing carbon emissions wherever possible, console server infrastructure can help. A console server gives organizations the ability to manage every aspect of a facility, including individual server instances, through a remote terminal. This not only allows facilities to operate at peak efficiency, it also cuts the carbon emissions created by engineers traveling between facilities to perform day-to-day maintenance tasks.
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.
According to the study, the global data center market is expanding at an unsustainable pace. The industry already uses 1.5 percent of the world's power, and emerging markets, such as Africa, the Asia-Pacific and many parts of South America and Eastern Europe are all experiencing rapid data center industry growth as more organizations build facilities in those regions. This is leading to something of a crisis around the world, as energy costs are rising, virtualization and cloud computing are leading to rapid expansion in the commercial market and many operators simply cannot afford to keep running their facilities while using as much power as they are currently consuming.
At the same time, environmentally conscious companies have already started bringing about change in the sector. The study found improved cooling technologies, more efficient power delivery systems and other data center sustainability tools are already beginning to pay dividends throughout the sector, with even more to be gained if a greater volume of operators implement green IT initiatives in their data centers.
Eric Woods, research director for Pike Research, explained that significant operational changes in the sector is making sustainability a key priority.
"The drive toward green data centers is a response to business requirements to reduce costs across the company as well as a response to environmental concerns. Within the data center environment, that translates to a mandate to reduce energy consumption, which in turn is driving innovation. Data center operators are exploring new ideas related to business models, facility construction, layout and design, air flow dynamics, new technology, and monitoring and management tools," said Woods.
For businesses looking to improve data center efficiency by simply reducing carbon emissions wherever possible, console server infrastructure can help. A console server gives organizations the ability to manage every aspect of a facility, including individual server instances, through a remote terminal. This not only allows facilities to operate at peak efficiency, it also cuts the carbon emissions created by engineers traveling between facilities to perform day-to-day maintenance tasks.
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.
