Four Metrics Define Data Center "Greenness"

Introduction

Quick overview of the benefits of "going green":

Cost savings to company
Investor and consumer goodwill
Environmental concerns
As the green movement continues to grow, going green now will ensure that you easily meet upcoming industry legislation and regulations.

Challenges to going green:

Power vs. Energy

Power is a spot measurement at a particular point in time. Peak power in a Datacenter determines the size of the UPS, cooling system, and utility feeders. Saving power tends to reduce the CapEx investment for new Datacenters and allows deferment of expensive capacity expansions to existing Datacenters. These capital savings are much more profitable to a Datacenter operator than changes in a utility bill, so most Datacenter operators are concerned with saving power.
Energy is consumption over a period of time. Policy-makers and corporate-level enterprise-sustainability initiatives are typically more interested in energy, since energy consumption requires greater output at a power plant, which in turn creates more carbon dioxide emissions and other pollutants.
No clear hierarchy or supervision: (“When efficiency is everyone’s job, it’s no one’s job.”)
To overcome this challenge, the responsibility for each category of efficiency potential must be delegated to a specific group within the Datacenter organization. This delegation will create accountability by ensuring that someone is actually performing the gap analysis between current practices and best practices, as well as making beneficial efficiency improvements.

The Solution

The Uptime Institute defines four key metrics for determining your Datacenter’s relative environmental level: IT systems design and architecture, IT hardware asset utilization,
IT hardware efficiency and site physical infrastructure overhead. This schema allows the intricate overall challenge to be broken down into manageable segments and delegated to a specific personnel group for independent optimization.

IT Systems Design and Architecture

Responsibility of CIOs/CTOs
Options to consider:

Use active-active datacenters.
Use mainframes instead of servers.
Utilize different tier functionality levels for different application-availability requirements.
Utilize centralized processing.
Reduce number of redundant global dataset copies, disaster recovery, etc.

IT Hardware Asset Utilization

Responsibility of CIOs, CTOS and senior datacenter executives
Options to consider:

Turn off servers and storage units that are running applications which are no longer needed, or running no applications at all.
Virtualize both applications and storage (where appropriate).
Enable server power-save features.

IT Hardware Efficiency

Responsibility of IT architecture and capacity-planning executives
Options to consider:

Utilize power supplies which convert AC power to DC power more efficiently.
Select chips, drives and other internal components that do more useful work with less DC power.

Site Physical Infrastructure Overhead

Responsibility of the facility or corporate real estate (CRE) decision-makers
Options to consider:

Design and operate the site physical infrastructure efficiently.
Continue to meet business-appropriate levels of uptime, concurrent maintenance and fault tolerance.

Conclusion

Conflict of interest and lack of internal hierarchy can hinder your efforts to achieve the benefits of an effective green initiative. However, these roadblocks can be overcome by using the Uptime Institute’s four key metrics to determine your Datacenter’s relative environmental level. This framework allows you to break down the intricacies of a companywide green initiative into less intimidating segments, with clear supervisor responsibilities delegated to specific personnel groups for independent optimization. By resolving these major challenges, you enable your Datacenter to maximize your efficiency, sustainability and profitability to their fullest extent.

A respected provider of educational and consulting services since 1993, the Uptime Institute has helped many facilities and Information Technology organizations maximize their Datacenter uptime; most are Fortune 100 companies concerned about their site infrastructure availability. In addition to pioneering numerous industry innovations such as the Tier Classification System (the industry’s current standard), the Uptime Network instructs its Site Uptime Network members using interactive conferences, site tours, benchmarking, best practices, white papers, seminars, symposia, and abnormal incident collection and analysis. The Uptime Institute also conducts sponsored research and certifies products, Datacenter tier level and site resiliency. For more information, contact the Uptime Institute at 2904 Rodeo Park Drive East, Building 100, Santa Fe, NM 87505; phone: (505) 986-3900; fax: (505) 982-8484; or visit them on the Web at www.uptimeinstitute.org.