NEW YORK, USA: Today’s data centre is going through a constant state of flux in an attempt to keep up with current demands. The data landscape grows exponentially, and with that growth comes the need to expand current storage and data centre infrastructures. This expansion is a fact businesses in every vertical have come to accept, but it comes with a price.

The Data Landscape
Four billion dollars is spent every year on data centre energy consumption and this number will only continue to climb. The type of data growth is also a contributing cost factor; mission critical data is growing in the enterprise environment. This means companies are buying more expensive energy hungry equipment to provide needed fast access and redundancy at both the server and storage level.

Businesses may have accepted that they will have to make necessary accommodations for data growth, but what some have not considered is that this growth has limits. Power is not an infinite resource; in fact, industry experts predict that 96 percent of data centers will not have enough power by 2011.

In a landscape this progressive and complex it is easy to see how a movement like green IT can run rampant. Consumers are bombarded from every angle with green claims. Some green products legitimately lessen data center impact and others greenwash less than environmentally friendly technologies.

And until recently, guidelines to navigate truly green solutions were sparse. But thanks to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Energy Star standards have been established for Data Center server products. The EPA, along with the non-profit Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) and manufacturers in the storage community, is in the process of developing an Energy Star standard for enterprise storage as well.

Measurement Standards
Both SNIA and the EPA realize that there is no silver bullet for reaching green data center status. No one data center improvement will yield a green data center, a comprehensive approach is required. As an extension of that reasoning overall data center greenness should be an inclusive statement.

The EPA uses the metric of power usage effectiveness (PUE). This is measured as the total power entering the data center over the power used by the sum of the IT equipment inside. Numbers nearing one are considered a good ratio, numbers up over 2.5 (the average data centre) could use improvement. One estimate suggests that if all current best practices are in place, a PUE of 1.6 can easily be reached.

SNIA measures efficiency as a function of power consumed on an individual device basis using metrics such as Gbs/W, and IOPs/W. Keep in mind, SNIA also takes into consideration the market sector each storage environment exists within. A SAN in a SMB environment would not be judged equally to a SAN in an enterprise environment.

• Gbs/W: A measurement of the number of gigabits per second that are achieved for every watt of power. This metric quantifies physical capacity versus energy consumption.

• IOPs/W: A measure of the Input and/or Outputs per second from disk for every watt of power. This metric shows you the amount of computation that can be delivered for every watt of power consumed. It is the metric that places value on performance versus energy consumption.

These measurements provide a construct for determining overall energy efficiency while placing a value on performance. Additional software functionality is often useful in improving storage efficiency, but effectiveness is dependent on how the customer implements and uses the functionality.

What Does the Green Movement Mean for Data Centers?
The EPA and SNIA have both recognized that the IT community should not have to sacrifice performance and capacity capabilities in the name of going green. Instead they promote solutions that uniquely address data center pain points, while reducing environmental impact. This has been best achieved so far primarily through energy savings initiatives.

What does all this mean for data centers? It may mean that more regulations are coming, and data centers may be held to a standard of environmental responsibility in the future. For the time being however, this means that the IT community is receiving an invaluable set of best practices that will bring to light solutions that cost less for power and cooling, and meet or exceed expectations in performance and capacity. These best practices are a step towards doing more with less, which has been and always will be a key driver of innovation in the IT world.

What Does the Green Movement Mean for Vendors?
The Green Movement has created a huge opportunity for vendors to participate in a competitive environment that has the potential to yield groundbreaking advances in data center technology. The storage industry in particular is running with this concept and continues to introduce technology that is changing the face of the industry.

Unfortunately, they have also dressed up some pigs in lipstick and presented it to the market as a green solution. To try and alleviate this problem, some truly green and compelling approaches are detailed below.