| When it comes to reducing IT energy consumption, there is no one technology solution.
That was Vijay Sankaran’s message to the 200 information technology managers gathered in New York last Thursday for IDC’s Green IT Forum.
Sankaran, the director of infrastructure operations at Ford Motor, ran down all the proposed solutions to controlling data center energy consumption costs, which he said reached $4.5 billion in 2006 and was on a pace to reach $7.4 billion by 2011.
Those solutions include: buying machines with energy efficient chips, deploying virtualization, installing server rack cooling systems, going to blade servers, and building new data centers in “icy climates.”
These are all good moves, he said, but, by themselves, not good enough.
It’s the complexity of IT that really thwarts our ability to go green, he said. Complexities such as running redundant data centers, especially for large, global companies that may have picked up data centers as part of a merger or acquisition; the poor utilization of existing information resources; increased data and storage usage; inefficient applications, which consume an ever increasing amount of processing powers (he said he’s heard of some applications growing by 1 terabyte a month); and the inability to leverage common computing platforms.
Only “complexity reduction” can produce sustainable green benefits, Sankaran said.
He recommends three actions: Consolidate and virtualize data centers, standardize IT equipment, and simplify processes and applications.
“At the end of the day, we can throw a lot of point solutions at this problem,” he said. “But only by taking a holistic approach can we produce sustainable green benefits.”
When looking to consolidate and virtualize the data center, he advised companies to include everything from server reduction, to storage consolidation, to virtualization in their plans.
When looking at standardizing technology, companies need to ask if they need all the platforms they’ve installed. Do they need the Unix and Linux and Window platforms? Or can they standardize on one?
And when looking at simplifying their operations, companies need to consider not just the technology they’re using, but also their business processes. Lots of different processes, he said, result in applications sprawl. Also, Sankaran said, companies should see if they can start to decommission applications that they rarely, if ever, use.
Taking a holistic approach, he says, will not only help reduce a company’s energy needs, but should reduce cost and increase the quality of the IT operation.
“Those who make significant changes at the process and applications level will harness benefits that cannot even be imagined,” he said.
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