Here’s something to noodle on: What if, each Monday for a month, you were to write down how many times you hear the words “Going Green” or “Green Revolution” in your day-to-day business. Well, given that Green IT is all the rage, I’m betting the amount of paper you’d use to keep track would upset many environmentalists.
Concern for the environment is nothing new. Actually, the movement started in the early 70s, targeting mostly high pollutant manufacturers. While interest in making the environment cleaner has never waned, the movement lost some public interest and media attention over the years. It was no longer “The Next Big Thing.”
But the arrival of the data center era has changed all that. Capital expenditures continue to rise as companies look to boost the reliability, efficiency and sheer power of these infrastructures. And the numbers back it up. Industry analysts estimate new investments in foundational data center technologies will only rise in the coming decade. According to IDC, through 2015, the networking market alone is expected to grow faster than the entire IT market combined.
But bigger data centers mean more power — a fact that hasn’t gone unnoticed by environmentalists. According to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), data centers consume as much as 20 times more energy per square foot than a typical office building. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. It’s reported the total electric bill to effectively operate a typical IT infrastructure worldwide in 2005 was $7.2 billion.
These numbers obviously have environmental groups concerned. Recently, the environmental advocate group Greenpeace set out to identify the world’s most inefficient data centers. The idea was to create a “call to action” and potentially solve the problem of dirty data centers. And their effort is striking a chord with the media.
A recent piece in the Montreal Gazette reports that just one Google search can cause the emission of almost 10 grams of carbon into the atmosphere: “Add up all of the more than one billion daily Google searches, throw in 60 million Facebook status updates each day, 50 million tweets and 250 billion emails per day, and you’re seriously helping to melt some Greenland glaciers.”
The problem is, data centers aren’t getting smaller, they’re getting bigger. This means more energy, more carbon emissions and more criticism from environmentalists. So, is there a solution? Many feel that full visibility into actual energy used is key to solving the problem.
“Data center managers must have the information they need to make informed decisions for effective planning and management of data center assets and physical infrastructure to ensure the service levels the company expects. They also must have the insight to properly plan and forecast future data center capacities, including space, power, and cooling and network connection.”
Enter Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM). (DCIM) is enterprise data center technology combining information technology and facility management to enable the centralized monitoring, management, and intelligent capacity planning of the data center’s critical systems. DCIM is driven by a platform that can conduct real-time monitoring and management across IT and facility infrastructures – helping companies maximize data center ROI and achieve greater levels of data center efficiency and power efficiency.
Basically, DCIM creates a living model of the infrastructure — offering a comprehensive inventory of all physical and logical assets, models changes that may occur, and demonstrates how performance and energy use are impacted. The solutions help companies achieve optimal power and cooling efficiency through performance tracking and alert monitoring in addition to tracking data center network load trends, capacity and growth.
And the team at FieldView Solutions is helping companies across the globe realize the full power of DCIM. Since 2003, FieldView technology has been at work in some of the largest data centers across the US, Europe and Asia. FieldView’s ongoing success with Fortune 100 companies in the financial, technology, pharmaceutical, healthcare and commercial real estate sectors has catapulted our reputation as the industry’s leading provider of DCIM.
The FieldView platform is a web-based enterprise data center technology designed to meet the most stringent data security, application resiliency and bandwidth requirements of corporate IT networks. It includes a powerful real-time data collection engine that helps data operators manage IT assets and the supporting infrastructure to maximize resource utilization and energy efficiency. The intuitive front-end powers immediate access to vast amounts of real-time data for informed decision-making on the core data that affects businesses, including energy utilization and efficiency.
The old saying is true: “What was once old IS now new again.” Growing importance of the data center has put the “Green Revolution” squarely back in the spotlight. Time for games is over, so put down the pen and stop tallying “green” references. It’s time to step up, stop taking notes and start taking action. And tools like DCIM will help you do the right thing – for your company AND the environment.
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