Go green to save energy, cost and more

BANGALORE, INDIA: India’s economy is growing at a tremendous pace. Unfortunately, crucial resources like power and energy production have not been able to keep pace with this growth, resulting in widespread energy deficiencies across the country.

The onus therefore, is on corporate India to take the lead in ensuring that their businesses are aligned to energy efficient and sustainable practices.

People's lives today require refrigerators, automobiles and air conditioning, and data center power requirements are competing with the increasing demand from consumers for these and other appliances that go with an expanding economy, so any reduction in IT power requirements is a welcome news.

Today, faced with an alarming rate of data growth and unstructured data explosion across industry verticals, organizations have been put under excessive pressure in managing their storage infrastructure.

Also read: India's spending on green IT to double by 2015

The volume of data is growing at a rate of 16-75 per cent a year and unstructured data is growing by 61.7 per cent compound annual growth rate (as per an IDC and Taneja group report). IT costs are increasing by 7-8 per cent per year.

While capital costs have remained flat due to an increase in hardware technology, operational costs continue to escalate and currently form the majority of the total cost of IT. This in turn has a huge impact on the power and cooling costs associated with running data centres.

As a result, organizations can no longer approach being green as a voluntary activity conducted as part of their CSR initiatives. Organizations require a systematic, well rounded and strategic approach to green technology that can not only help them cut down on costs, but also become more energy efficient and sustainable.

Merely deploying 'Green' technology does not equate to a sustainable business practice. Sustainability involves planning for the long term and requires a concerted effort on the part of senior management to inculcate sustainable practices at all levels and functions within an organization.

In storage terms, a 750 GB SATA disk can be classified as 'green' technology since it can replace ten 75 GB FC disks for the same carbon footprint, but it may not provide 'sustainable' technology for applications that need performance and reliability.

Take green pledge to promote Green IT

In essence, organizations today need to ensure that their data centres are running at maximum efficiency in order to make the most of limited energy resources. This can only happen through a pre-planned and systematic approach to energy management within the data centre, and a long term vision for sustainability that allows companies to invest in the right technology today that will continue to serve the organization’s interests tomorrow.

Vivekanand Venugopal is the VP and GM, India of Hitachi Data Systems