It’s critical to invest in IT equipment and facilities based on your actual needs, Ted Samson points out. While that may sound painfully obvious, all too often many resources, including space, dollars, and electricity, are squandered on excess servers, storage, cooling, and such. “Yes, there’s something to be said for wiggle room and peace of mind, but there comes a point when the price of that peace of mind simply can’t be justified,” Samson writes in this Sustainable IT entry. That’s where The Uptime Institute’s “Cost Model: Dollars per kW plus Dollars per Square Foot of Computer Floor,” offers perspective on how to plan for a datacenter, as delineated by Tiers I-IV. The chief differentiators among those are downtime and, of course, cost. “If the differences in capital expenses don’t give you cause to reconsider your Tier choice for a future datacenter, the differences in operating costs might. A higher-tier datacenter with more active, redundant power means you’re paying more for power and cooling per server,” Samson writes. Technology Industry