Adoption of Energy Efficiency Features in Data Centers

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One of the areas I find interesting is greener data centers, and that often translates into energy efficiency - both on the power and the cooling sides. HP's Converged Infrastructure strategy includes Data Center Smart Grid which provides a framework of energy management tools for HP products. Of course, just because HP provides the tools, it doesn't mean that they are used. From that perspective, late last week, I read a couple of interesting papers.

The first, from CDW, is the 2010 Energy Efficient IT Report [Download]. They have done this study in the past few years as well, so there is some comparative data. Not surprisingly, they found that 74%of organizations (up 5% from 2009) had or were developing an energy efficiency program. The reason for this is as expected:

•  56% of the surveyed organizations reduced costs
• an additional 20% or surveyed organizations reduced usage although costs increased.

However, the most interesting thing from a data center perspective was that the top used strategy was to purchase servers with newer, lower power/low wattage processors. That is a good start, but that doesn't mean that more advanced power management features which could also significantly reduce energy usage on these systems are actually being used

The natural next question is how would these features be adopted. The Green Grid, and industry consortium of technology vendors, has just released a white paper titled "Roadmap for the Adoption of Power -Related Features in Servers." Two of the conclusions really caught my attention. After surveying customers, they found that many data center operators lacked an awareness of the power management features. In addition, the fear that power management features may have a negative impact on server availability, performance or SLA's was of more concern than power consumption.

From an education perspective, if you want to know more about HP's power management strategy, you can check out the HP Data Center Smart Grid web site or read the white paper [PDF]. If you want to get more in depth information on HP server power management, you can find it on the HP Thermal Logic and the HP Integrity Thermal Logic web sites respectively.

Are you interested in server power management? What does your organization do to combat rising energy costs? Do you use any advanced power management functionality? Comments and feedback are always welcome.

Jacob Van Ewyk