– Jack Pouchet, Director of Energy Initiatives at Emerson Network Power (www.emerson.com), says:
Servers often represent 65 to 90 percent of the production IT equipment load within a data center and as such the single largest potential for energy savings. With each tech refresh within an enterprise class data center one can expect to obtain a 5 to 7X increase in server performance on a raw CPU basis per watt and often can exceed that as server manufacturers seek to reduce overall power consumption while improving the power supply, CPU, and memory efficiency.
With each watt saved at the server level (input on the power cord) often translating to a building level energy savings of 2 to 2.5X (national average for PUE from EPA data is over 2.1) it is vital that IT professionals and facility managers work together to specify the most efficient server and IT equipment with each new purchase.
From the IT perspective one has to expect some degree of chaos in the process as demands on the IT systems are very dynamic. Having a plan in place to manage that will be the key to success.
The basics to manage IT and infrastructure in a data center are the same regardless of growth. It starts with developing a data center roadmap that addresses the strategic management of existing IT hardware and legacy applications and moves through IT asset identification (via tools like Aperture and AMIE from Avocent) and life-cycle management, consolidation, virtualization, to infrastructure and white-space management and deployment strategy for future IT deployments. All of that is a lot harder than it sounds as business demands always seem to get in the way and there are always a lot of urgent fires that need to be addressed.
