Lack of resource management is holding back green data center efforts

Companies who are failing to improve resource management and process efficiency are causing a drag on their green data center initiatives.

So says a report released at DatacenterDynamics London conference from the Aperture Research Institute.

The report entitled: "Organizations Overlooking Significant Opportunities to Improve Efficiency and Reduce Expenses, Despite Adoption of Green Initiatives," concludes that most organizations are missing opportunities to optimize data center performance by neglecting to manage people and resources as part of their initiatives.

Steve Yellen, principal of the Aperture Research Institute:. "Nearly all of the respondents in the survey - 96 percent - believe they could better manage their resources to extract additional capacity, some by 30 percent or more. Opportunities to better manage resource utilization are not only plentiful, but financially beneficial, since they can delay capital investments by improving utilization and extending the life of available resources.”

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 percent indicating that 11 percent or more of their servers are ghosts.

"The practice of data center performance optimization maintains that an optimized data center actually achieves not just energy efficiency, but resource and process efficiency as well,” Yellen said. "By focusing largely on energy efficiency, many organizations are not only missing opportunities to reduce costs, but preventing the initiatives they do have in place from achieving their full potential."

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

Aperture questioned more than 100 data center professionals.

The report was unveiled at Datacenterdynamics London conference where Chief Technology Officer of Knürr, Dr. Peter Koch, Jack Pouchet, Director Energy Initiatives at Emerson Network Power and Steve Yellen, VP Marketing at Aperture give a presentation entitled “A new economic model for managing efficient data centers in the 21st century.”

“Our lecture was aimed at data center managers who want to realize energy-efficient and climate-friendly IT environments”, said  Pouchet.

“Therefore we focused our lecture on appropriate methods for economical operations of data centers”, said Dr. Peter Koch.

One of these optimal solutions is Liebert XDR from Emerson Network Power. The heat exchanger removes heat from racks before it enters the data center. This so called “Back-of-Rack”-cooling module is fixed to the rear of the rack. The solution draws hot air and cools it to the point where the impact on the room is close to neutral. After this process the air is entered into the data center. The system operates with a pumped refrigerant that is 700 percent more efficient than water. Even equipment damages caused by water leakages are impossible. The operators benefit from this solution because additional fans become unnecessary. By abolishing other fans, energy savings of up to 48 percent can be realized and as a result the costs are also considerably reduced.

Emerson will also be present at DatacenterDynamics conferences in Amsterdam and Frankfurt later this month.

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