The UK’s largest data center event kicked off with presentations from the BBC on how content demand is driving its data center investment strategy. However, the first sessions focused on practical steps for operators to go green and how carbon commitments will impact the future of the data center.

The two-day event featured a range of panel sessions, presentations and interactive roundtables which provided practical advice on how energy can be saved in UK data centers. One of the first presentations revealed the studies behind figures, which showed how UK operators could easily do away with water chillers to keep their data centers cool, thus driving down energy use within missioncritical facilities across the UK.

Building an operational strategy based around energy-saving and cutting carbon to deal with carbon-reduction commitments will dominate design and operation of mission-critical facilities in future.

In a new development for 2009, the conference include interactive roundtable discussion groups covering a roadmap for Carbon Reduction Commitment compliance, the Green Grid’s newly released European freecooling maps, and a frank appraisal of energyefficiency metrics and their use.

RESOURCE MANAGEMENT FAILURES
Companies failing to improve resource management and process efficiency are causing a drag on their green data center initiatives, according to a report released by the Aperture Research Institute at the DatacenterDynamics London conference.

The report, Organizations overlooking significant opportunities to improve efficiency and reduce expenses, despite adoption of green initiatives, concludes that most organisations are missing opportunities to optimise data center performance by neglecting to manage people and resources as part of their initiatives.

Steve Yellen, principal of the Aperture Research Institute, says: “Nearly all of the respondents in the survey – 96% – believe they could better manage their resources to extract additional capacity, some by 30% or more.

“Opportunities to better manage resource utilisation are not only plentiful, but financially beneficial, since they can delay capital investments by extending the life of available resources,” states the report.

The report also identified opportunities to better manage resources at the data center IT infrastructure layer through the reduction of unproductive, or ghost servers.

Ninety percent of respondents reported the presence of at least some ghost servers in their facilities, with 18% indicating that 11% or more of their servers are ghosts.

The survey found that 87% of participants have energy-efficiency initiatives in place – up from 35% last year. Thirty-two percent of respondents intend to focus on fully utilising existing capacities to cope with reduced or stagnant budgets, and 19% plan to cut back on capital investments.

Aperture questioned more than 100 data center professionals.

CARBON REPORTING DIFFICULTY
The Carbon Reporting and Energy Consumption scheme, due to enter its initial stages in April 2010, could punish IT users indiscriminately and out of proportion to their effect on the environment, warned Mark Chester, a property lawyer specialising in regeneration projects for Wragge & Co, at the DatacenterDynamics conference in London.

“The scheme could have big implications for data center managers,” according to Chester. “Operators could be picking up the tax and be unable to pass it on to the user,” he says – or be unable to quantify the tax fairly among clients based on their use.

Colocation contracts are akin to landlordtenant agreements, where tenants are not necessarily bound to bear the costs.

SKANSKA IN STRATEGIC PARTNERSHIP AGREEMENT WITH OSISOFT
Skanska USA announced a strategic partnership with OSIsoft, on the heels of a study entitled, Transforming the market: Energy efficiency in buildings. “Data centers are not sustainable from a capital or environmental perspective,” says senior vice president of Skanska Mission Critical Jakob Carnemark.

“We are focused on delivering a dynamic connection between application deployment and resulting infrastructure and energy requirements. This feedback loop will allow companies to optimise on efficiency of capital, energy and their overall carbon footprint,” says Carnemark.

The OSIsoft PI System compiles data center information from IT assets and from operational and facilities systems, resulting in an energyconscious environment that enables real-time reporting and decision-support monitoring.

Skanska has extended this platform with real-time optimisation algorithms, reducing energy use by adapting to changes such as environment, equipment performance and IT load.

OSIsoft vice president Martin Otterson says: “Together, we intend to exceed the target of 60% versus 24% on energy-efficiency improvements for existing data centers.”

The partnership will focus on optimising application deployment efficiency, including energy, water and infrastructure, creating dynamic feedback loops to drive more efficient design and lower build cost of data centers, and using data to improve operations.

NLYTE RELEASED VERSIONS 5.2 OF MANAGEMENT SUITE
Nlyte enhanced its Data Center Performance Management (DCPM) suite with chassis management, workflow management and capacity trending and analysis functions.

The Nlyte Discover Module can automatically scan the data center network to discover physical assets and their properties, and populates the Nlyte DCPM database.  

This article first appeared in DatacenterDynamics FOCUS magazine