CIOL: How is the energy consumption inside a data center being measured?
PM: Metrics to measure:
Power Usage effectiveness (PUE)” and “Data Center Infrastructure efficiency (DCIE)”: These metrics are used to compare the amount of electricity a data centre consumes for power and cooling with the amount of power used by the data centre's IT equipment.
PUE = Ratio of total facility power and IT equipment power. This should be less than 2; the closer to 1, the better.
DCIE = IT equipment power x 100 Total facility power. DCIE is calculated in percentage. Bigger the number, better the scenario

CIOL: What are the steps taken towards data center consolidation?
PM: BSES Delhi data centre hosts 40 servers and greening the same has become one of our main and crucial activity for this year. Aligning data centre infrastructure with the business, while improving asset utilisation, lowering capital expenditures and decreasing energy consumption with consolidation technologies as well as services are the core activities towards the data center consolidation.

The Steps planned immediately for the same are:
SAN virtualisation
Automated patching
Common OS
Improved utilisation
Policy based management

CIOL: So what results are being expected once they are put into practise?
PM: We are only in the initial stages of the project. But at the same time we are assured of its positive outcome. The cost optimisation results shall be:
Annual storage cost saving
Improved business resilience
Increased asset utilisation
Less data centre downtime
Faster service deployment
Data centre footprint reduction
Easier Management