BANGALORE, INDIA: 'World Environment Day' - Here comes yet another day to stimulate awareness and to commemorate the wrong doings of human kind towards nature. Above all, it is a day to remind each one us to get involved in environment-friendly activities to save the earth, which a Native American Proverb rightly sums up, 'We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children.'

As the world marks the 38th World Environment Day on June 5, 2011, Vivekanand Venugopal, VP & GM, Hitachi Data Systems, India lists down a few best practices in order to make one's data centre green.

IT and Facilities Need to Work Together – There needs to be a closer linkage between IT department and facilities planning. 

Also Read: Six tips for green data centre storage

IT manager has traditionally been focused on scalability and performance while making his purchase decision, leaving  facility manager to worry about space and energy requirements.

Sustainability is not a new word in IT industry, however, there is a renewed interest in how it can mitigate the crunch of encroaching energy usage and related costs affecting today's data centre.

Inventory all the Infrastructure - An efficiency inventory of physical IT infrastructure should encompass power and cooling usage, physical security, operational procedures, storage configuration and facility layout.

Consider these categories:
¦Storage Efficiency: Evaluate the amount of storage per square foot. Estimate storage utilization percentage per system or cluster. Using unified management software allows IT lead­ers to have better visibility and control over pooled storage and capacity usage, versus siloed or disparate systems that must be individually monitored for utilization rates.

Thin provisioning tools can help improve capacity utilization with fewer steps.

¦ Power Efficiency: Calculate approximate power usage per floor tile or area occupied. This may be difficult for IT managers that do not have access to electric bills. Older machines and burdened performance thresholds draw more power and cooling than systems running at optimal levels.

¦Space Efficiency: Look at the density of systems per floor space used. Higher density architectures and systems with smaller footprints help improve space efficiency.