Technology alone won’t solve your power problems

The latest data I’ve seen pointing to a serious problem comes from a survey conducted by ONStor, a provider of NAS products. The company surveyed 369 IT decision makers and came away with truly troubling findings. First, 63 percent of the respondents said their organizations had experienced a shortage of power, space, and/or cooling — without warning. Second, 43 percent are bracing for trouble, saying that at the current data growth rate, they could only stay in their current infrastructure for another six months to a year if they changed nothing. And third, 60 percent ofthe respondents said they either have a green plan in place, will have one in place in the next two years — or have at least talked about the issue with management.

While I extend a hearty batch of kudos to those who do have a plan in place, I’ve got to say I feel some pangs of concern for the rest of the group, given that so many companies are reporting past or pending space, power, or cooling shortages. It’s a serious problem, because it effectively translates to having to pull the reins on business growth until you can find devise strategies and accumulate the resources to deal with those problems.

Complicating matters further: There’s no silver bullet, a point made quite clearly by Lewis Curtis, infrastructure architect and advisor at Microsoft. “Green datacenters = an architectural commitment, not a product strategy.”

Indeed, as he points out, technologies such as virtualization and MAID and super-efficient quad-core processors can all potentially contribute to solving the power, space, and cooling problems companies face, but without a clear, forward-looking plan and ongoing processes, you’re not going to reach that happy green place.

It’s not an easy endeavor. There is, of course, the complex task of creating the technical blueprint for your green datacenter, taking into account present and future needs and figuring out, for example, which types of servers will best suit your business needs, which storage solutions make the most sense, what kind of cooling is ideal, and so forth.

Then there are factors that are beyond your control. For example, you very likely aren’t generating your own power for your datacenter (unless you’re AISO.net), so you need to be mindful of what’s going on with your local utility and whether it will be able to provide the juice to meet your datacenter needs.

But beyond the technical planning, embracing greenery requires a significant shift in thinking throughout the organization. For example, it requires buy-in from management, who might not grasp the magnitude of the problem and thus might not invest the necessary resources in green projects that don’t overtly contribute to the bottom line or to the growth of the business — despite the fact that there are substantial long-term energy savings to be reaped from a green datacenter, not to mention losses that would be incurred with downtime or the inability to expand.

It also requires a shift in mindset from IT admins and staff, who will need to incorporate new processes in their regimen. For example, Rob Aldrich, marketing manager for datacenter solutions at Cisco, notes the importance of taking regular snapshots of energy efficiency, “setting up benchmarks to measure hardware utilization and performing regular audits. … Figure out what’s going on so you can make better decisions.”

And if you want to look beyond the datacenter and strive to make your entire operation greener, it requires buy-in from all your employees as they rethink how they use company resources, decide whether they’ll make extra print-outs of a document, and remember to shut down their computers and turn off the lights at the end of the day.

Suffice to say that the problem here is real, and the solution is complex. The good news is= that more companies are, in fact, becoming aware of the problem. Moreover, we’re seeing big-name companies working both individually and side-by-side (a la The Green Grid) to deliver green benchmarks as well as products that interoperate to deliver greater power efficiency from the chip, memory, and power supply level up.

But those are all just tools. The real work lies with not only IT but C-level executives to devise a cohesive, long-term green strategy and to facilitate an organizational transformation to embrace that strategy and drive it forward. And perhaps assigning a point person to lead the charge is a good place to start.