Cassatt Corporation, a leader in providing software to make datacenters more efficient, conducted a survey of 215 IT and facilities personnel in late 2007 and early 2008 to study what changes are underway or planned in the way datacenters are designed and operated to combat the energy crisis. The survey and follow-up phone interviews specifically sought answers regarding how many companies are pursuing energy-efficiency initiatives, what types, why, and what data they used to help make decisions.
Cassatt found that nearly two-thirds (62%) of respondents are working on a datacenter energy-efficiency project now or expect to within the next year. This finding is consistent with recent surveys by other firms that show a healthy majority of companies have defined a "green or energy-efficient datacenter strategy. It is also no surprise given the dramatic rise in the price of power; increasing awareness of global warming and the role of datacenters in contributing to this problem; and the fact that many datacenters are power-constrained by their existing facilities: 43% of respondents in the survey said their datacenter is within 25% of its maximum power capacity. This finding-that datacenters are running out of power-is consistent with a March 2008 survey by The Uptime Institute where 42% of respondents indicated that their datacenters would run out of power in 12-24 months ; as well as with a recent Gartner study that reports, "By 2011, more than 70% of US enterprise datacenters will face tangible disruptions related to floor space, energy consumption and/or costs.
What energy-efficiency projects are underway? Consolidating the number of power-hungry machines in the datacenter, usually through virtualization, tops the list, as expected. Sixty-nine percent of respondents are pursuing a server consolidation/virtualization strategy, and nearly 49% are pursuing storage consolidation/virtualization. Most companies (62%) have virtualized servers in both production and dev/test environments. Large companies are even more likely to have virtualized these environments (77%). As companies consolidate servers, they're also replacing the older, power-hungry models with more power-efficient servers (nearly 51%).
While many have these longer-term, hardware-based projects underway, our survey showed another, more innovative approach is on the radar screen. As expected, more than half of respondents recognize the importance of using more efficient equipment; however, less than a quarter of these (24%) have plans in the works to improve the efficient operation of that equipment with approaches like server power-management software. This trend holds true for companies that are virtualizing their systems, too. Of the 45% of respondents who use blade servers as part of their virtualization strategies, just over half use power management. This is a missed opportunity for many organizations, but shows that a few are looking toward innovative techniques that have been shown to have compelling, short-term benefits.