Green Data Centre Assessment
What is it?
Our approach involves assessing your data centre efficiency in a holistic manner and developing a strategy that will help you to reduce your energy bill and physical footprint, while increasing efficiency and service level agreements.
Our Green Data Centre assessment looks at three main areas of focus:
- Utilisation - Our experience and correlation with industry statists has shown that server and resource workload utilisation only accounts for approximately 20% of the deployed computing resources we have deployed within the IT infrastructure. In some cases we have seen this to drop as low as 10%. The same also applies to your online data storage systems in that only 20% of this data is actively used within the last 30 days, yet it is all residing on the same fast expensive 15k fiber channel disks in hope that one day it will be accessed.
- IT Resources - Of the deployed computing capacity, only 30% of the power consumed within a server is used by the processor. The remaining 70% of power is consumed by the power supply, memory, disk drives and the system planar. Energy consumption has doubled since the year 2000 with the rise in cheap commodity servers within the data centre. When you factor in the rise in energy prices and the number of systems deployed the word "cheap" no longer springs to mind.
- Data Centre - IT equipment such as servers, storage and networking equipment are all typically refreshed on a 3-5 year schedule. Unfortunately the same cannot be said for the HVAC systems which are supporting your IT equipment. In some cases, it's the same 15 year old systems which are in place which are very inefficient. Under floor blockages, no hot/cold aisle configurations, and heat hot spots all put these systems under additional pressure and increase the energy consumption consuled. In total, of your entire data centre energy consumption only 40% of this goes on IT load.
The assessment is delivered through a mixture of stakeholder interviews, questionnaires and onsite data gathering. The resulting report makes recommendations that cover a wide range of specific opportunities such as:
- Identification of virtualisation, consolidation and resource sharing opportunities within the environment.
- Develop a tighter process for IT procurement and installation which ensures that power management features are turned on and performance data is collected and trended.
- Identifies if the current data centre is adequately resources for future project needs
- Highlights the power, cooling and efficiency issues within the data centre
What are the benefits?
Detailed below are some of the benefits which we have been able to demonstrate to customers within their data centres:
- Allows you to retire power-hungry legacy hardware and the associated maintenance costs, while at the same time optimising underutilised servers.
- Reduced management, hardware, software, power and cooling costs.
- Improves RPO and RTO times for disaster recovery strategies
- Previous engagements have shown the following savings: 1.92% reduction in physical servers 2.78% of rack space consumed 3.88% reduction in power, heat & cooling costs 4.30% reduction in carbon footprint.
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