Data centres are energy sinks; their use of equipment and infrastructure is perplexingly inefficient; they cost a fortune to build, maintain and run. That may all be true, but it needs to be considered in the wider context of the value that the modern data centre delivers to the business.

In weighing those issues, the panel of experts gathered for the Future of the Data Centre 08 debate reported that there is little understanding of how to include business value in data centre efficiency calculations.

“Metrics such as power usage efficiency (PUE) can tell you how efficient a particular piece of kit is,” explains Andy Lawrence, eco-efficiency analyst for IT industry research house The 451 Group. “But you can’t start to calculate the efficiency of the data centre until you understand the usefulness of the work it is doing.”

And while the top experts in the field are working on these very problems, he adds, they have yet to agree upon any answers.

One thing IT executives can do today to elevate the data centre debate above the level of server power usage is to address the efficiency of what is running on them – the software.

“In some organisations, there is a culture of lazy coding,” explains Paul Court, technology services director of data centre hosting provider Telecity. “The developers will write a line of code that dramatically increases the required processing power when there is a much more efficient alternative,” he says. “Then they will just throw another server at the system because the kit is so cheap.”

Telecity offers a benchmarking service to its customers to help them improve the efficiency of their applications.

Green tape

The panel warned that legislation forcing companies to improve the efficiency of their

data centres is coming. The UK’s Climate Change Bill – not yet in force – will require all organisations that use more than 600 megawatts per hour to provide itemised details of their energy consumption, and will impose a carbon cap on such businesses by 2012.

Meanwhile, the European Union has already established a code of conduct for powering data centres.

“I can’t help feeling that this will form the basis of some kind of legislation,” says 451’s Lawrence.

Of more immediate concern, local councils are now asking companies that build data centres in their constituencies to meet certain targets for renewable energy use.

The true effect of this may not be that businesses get their data centres in ecological order, but instead that they move to less stringently controlled areas – or indeed pass the buck by outsourcing.

“Running the data centre is getting more and more expensive,” says Ian Gotts of business process solution provider Nimbus Partners. “All this ‘green tape’ on top of that cost is going to push people to outsource more of their IT from the organisation.”

“What people can outsource, they will,” agrees data centre consultant Mark Acton.

But even if businesses procure IT services from third parties, there may still be a legal obligation to keep track of the carbon footprint of the services they consume.

The 451 Group’s Lawrence presents what he believes to be the ideal model for managing green data centre resources – whether inside or outside the organisation.

“We need to define each business service in a way that takes into account the carbon costs and the benefits,” he explains. IT can often help reduce the carbon footprint of a business, by replacing document deliveries with file transfers or by intelligently routing service vehicles – a fact that surely must be included in calculations of data centre efficiency.

“But unfortunately, right now there just isn’t enough science to do that,” he adds.

Back to the Future of the Data Centre 08 contents page