BANGALORE, INDIA: According to Gartner's report, by the end of the year 2008, 50 percent of the current data centres will have inefficient power and cooling capacity to meet the demands of high density equipment. Thus, business continuity is going to face a major set back.

Towards a lean, green way

Much has been talked about green data centre, but not much have been materialized till date. As per studies, there will be a 10x increase in energy footprint in 10 years and by 2012, the cost of cooling and power is going to increase by 22 percent. For every Rs.. 1 spent on power, another 50 paise has to be spent on cooling.

Sandeep Ghildiyal, practice head-platform-consulting, Wipro, said, "Major concerns in the present scenario are how to reduce excessive heat generated from data centres and how to achieve power optimisation. Every CIO is in look out for redundancy and virtualisation is the best means to achieve it." He was speaking at ‘Data Centre 2008 Summit’, recently.

The word green has been around for quite sometime. "Green, in other terms is efficiency, i.e., efficient operations with minimum input costs in terms of electricity, water and capital," Ghildiyal added.

R S Prasad Rao, director, Ctrls Datacentres, said, "Change IT governance to incorporate energy consumption as a significant component to total cost of ownership. We found that only 28 percent of the available supply of cold air was directly cooling computer equipment. Whereas, 72 percent was bypassing the complete equipment, which dramatically reduced cooling."

Kallol Hazra, director-consulting, HP India, said, "Inside a data centre, front-to-back cooling is very inefficient and thus we tend to lose 20-35 percent of power. In the next four years, one out of four data centres will experience business disruption and 80 percent of data centres are over provisioned. The best practise to achieve cost optimisation is to transform IT from a physical to a strategic asset," Hazra added."