Power quality monitoring 

"There is no standard method to calculate how efficient or green a data centre is. In order to attain power optimisation, companies must adopt Green Grids/LEEDS, which are the world class 'Green IT Certified' ones," Ghildiyal averred.

"A common mistake CIOs tend to make is to design for worst-case scenario, which results in 'over engineered' solution, i.e. components are overpowered but remain underutilised, adding to the woe of cost structure," Ghildiyal added.

"40-50 percent of the inefficiency inside a data centre is due to lack of best practices deployed," Rao added. 

Max energy efficiency with min environment impact:

Switch to fewer high capacity disks
Space optimisation of racks: Trade between space and density inside a data centre
Use slower disks (7,200, 10,000 rpm)
Increase disk utilization
Move rarely accessed data to tape
Under-floor or overhead wiring
Go for solar panel
Use raised floor cooling.
Go for sensible cooling: Model the cooling flow (CFD) to minimize hotspots.

"Dynamic smart cooling is the way to go. That is to arrange racks alternately as hot and cold aisles. Inorder to increase the efficiency of the data centre, we deployed power and network wiring under-floor or overhead. Such a wiring mode was designed for five-ten years of lifecycle. Tiling of the data centre is also very crucial. We deployed modular racks for cooling. At HP, we also consolidated data centres and reduced it to three from 85 data centres in total," Hazra opined.

"During a span of three years (2005-2008) we found that power consumption was cut down by 40 percent. We were able to achieve decreased storage cost. Networking cost came down by 50 percent. By data centre consolidation we achieved 30 percent fewer servers," he added.

How to achieve cost optimisation of data centre

Virtualisation
Blade servers
Water-cooled air conditioning
Maximum utilisation of raised floor
Low cable coverage space
Light sensors
Water treatment and re-circulation plant
Hot air containment
Continuous monitoring