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Going gaga over green

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CIOL Bureau
New Update

APC, network-critical physical infrastructure solutions provider, has been advocating changing the legacy approach of data center architecture designing, which would reduce the consumption of energy and eliminates waste.

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This year energy cost has exceeded the cost on IT infrastructure and the trend will continue, says Subodh Tagare, marketing manager (India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh region), APC – MGE, in an interaction with Dheeksha Rabindra of CyberMedia News.

Increased energy cost has made enterprises to think of green data centers, opines Tagare. Excerpts from the interaction:

Why is this sudden hype for green data centers?

Green is (the) essence of adding value to the customers in an attempt to tie it with an underlined bigger trend, which is the concern for environment and climate. There are talks of environment friendly technologies but adoption is based on two objectives: first, the positive impact on environment and second, it should have some value to decision makers especially the IT team, which impacts the faster adoption process.

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The sudden trend I suspect is that there is a general believe that we have come to that cusp where there is an opportunity where IT teams can actually make a difference and also deliver on their own KPIs around availability, systems and others.

What is driving enterprises to go for green data centers?

Everyone recognizes that there are issues to be addressed in environment. Energy consumption is becoming the biggest issue in data centers. Till last year the cost of IT was more than the cost of energy. Now the cost of energy is far greater than the cost of computing and networking gear. In a way now economy has ensured to adopt greener data center.

The main reason for going for green data center is because the share of the cost between hardware and energy consumption has switched. Customers are now significantly concerned about this trend. Due to design elements of a data center, half of the energy consumed is wasted. Companies have to rethink the way they are designing the data centers in a way to reduce the consumption of energy. This has led to customers thinking of adopting blade servers.

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One of the major constraints for adoption of blade servers is cost. What will drive the customers going for blade servers?

It is expensive; therefore it is preventing adoption at this point of time. We have been talking about changing the architecture of the data centers since 2003. Now it is a given thing and customers are recognizing it. First stage was compaction that started happening with chips and second stage was physical consolidation of data centers and India has gone through this phase. Now we actually see people talking about virtualization. It is after this stage we see the take off of blade servers. This might take another two-three years.

How are vendors responding to green data centers?

Software people are looking at creating virtual servers. At chip layer, vendors are trying to deliver more processing capacity for each watt consumed. At server layer, vendors have already developed and adoption is taking place.

The physical layer vendors like us, are focusing on – instead of selling best in breed components, how the whole thing fits into a system and delivering the system to the customer has become far more important. We are attempting to move away from components to system along with services.

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Further, the legacy approach in designing the data center has to be changed. We have changed the monolithic UPS to modular UPS, which is scalable. This eliminates waste and consumes less energy. This also reduces the usage of lead. Ensuring modular data center eliminates waste.

How are enterprises responding to it? Has going green become a compelling factor? Enterprises are in favor for going green, as it is cheaper. Yes, it becomes a compelling factor as it reduces the cost on energy consumption. By going green, energy consumption can be reduced by 70 per cent. Customers are aware and have understood the concept of green data centers. Last two years significant adoption has been witnessed. It is far more important for us to keep reminding people about it.

© CyberMedia News

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