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While the data center green marketing push continues to gain momentum, the measured progress for green data centers is suspect. It’s unclear how much of this activity is designed to fuel capital spending and how much really saves energy.

If you ask almost any CIO (or CFO, CTO, or CEO), you’ll learn they have no idea how much energy they are consuming…let alone how much energy IT (Information Technology) could be saving. The CIO (or anyone for that matter) is rarely measured against a Green report card.

In moving organizations into their brand new data centers, it’s no longer shocking to see the same data center design mistakes being repeated. There are some decades-old recommendations that still don’t get followed that can have a direct effect on energy consumption.

• CRAC (Computer Room Air Conditioners) that don’t communicate with each other will waste energy “fighting” each other based on their own local conditions – While ASHRAE recommended way back in 1988 that this is a source of waste, walk around your brand new data center and observe your CRAC units duking it out cooling, humidifying and de-humidifying. What’s your plan to fix that?
• CRAC units placed around the perimeter of the room are less efficient than distributing them throughout the data center – Another recommendation based on research that gets ignored consistently.
• Humidity Matters – Actually, thermodynamics matter. But there is an important relationship between humidity and temperature you should seek to understand before you arbitrarily start adjusting your CRAC units.

After you’ve moved in, measure your energy costs and hold someone accountable. Every expert recommends this, but do you know how much energy you consumed last month and in what categories? Is anyone’s compensation tied to becoming more efficient?
Chuck Hollis presented some thoughtful suggestions for greening your data center several months ago. However, before you decide to expend the capital on virtualization, blade technology, or drive replacements, be certain you actually will retire the equipment you are supposedly replacing.

Finally, don’t confuse IT Capital spending with greening your data center. If you’re not measuring the energy you’re consuming in the first place and holding someone accountable for efficiency, perhaps the only greening happening is the transfer of money!

Data Center Relocation

Even as 365 Main takes the unprecedented step of publicly updating everyone on their root cause investigation of the generator failures that darkened many well-known web sites, will the lessons learned become lessons remembered? Take this short quiz for your own organization:

1. Are your DNS servers geographically dispersed? If all of your DNS servers go down with your other servers, then you will not be able to react and re-point critical functions to operational servers. Dispersing your DNS is simple to do and yet many organizations have not done even that.

2. Do you put too much faith in your utility’s past history? Like the stock market, past performance is no guarantee of future results. Many things outside their control can and do interrupt power.

3. Do you believe that generator and UPS testing are actually done under real-world conditions? The real story is that generators are manually started and tested and UPS systems are put into bypass mode. When actual events cause these systems to engage, unexpected things do happen.

When we move data centers, we often encounter single points of service delivery that must be corrected to move the data center while not affecting the customer’s service. You don’t need to move a data center to understand the value of geographic diversity. You also don’t need to brute force the problem by duplicating everything you have somewhere else.

The real question is will you act before an event costs you money?

Data Center Relocation