Processing .....please wait.. 
The article has been forwarded.... 
News >> Technology >>
Datacenters not monitoring energy use
By siliconindia
|
Tuesday, 29 September 2009, 18:16 IST
Bangalore: Datacenter and IT managers are not paying enough attention to the process of measuring and monitoring energy use in datacenters, according to a poll conducted by Gartner. Unless users create dashboards, they will not be able to reduce energy costs and meet compliance requirements.
The Gartner webinar conducted in April 2009 among 130 attendees from the Infrastructure and Operations (I&O) management found that, although green IT issues remain at the top of the agenda, respondents consider vendor and green procurement a low priority activity. While 68 percent of respondents thought datacenter energy management is an important green IT issue for the next 18 months, only seven percent consider green procurement and pushing vendors to create energy efficient solutions as their top priority.
"This finding affirmed in client conversations reveals that, although the green IT and data centre energy issue has been on the agenda, many managers feel that they have to deal with other concerns," said Rakesh Kumar, Vice President of Research, Gartner. "Even if more energy efficient servers or management tools were available, datacenter and IT managers are interested in internal projects."
Energy management can be effective through monitoring, modeling and measuring techniques. However, when asked which energy management metrics they will use in the next 18 months, 48 percent of respondents have not even considered the issue of metrics. "These metrics form the bedrock for internal cost and efficiency programmes and will become important for external use. Organizations that want to publicize their carbon usage through green accounting principles will need to have their energy use monitored," added Kumar.
In order to include metrics, measurement and modeling in a datacenter's green IT strategy, Gartner recommends that datacenter and IT managers implement recommendations such as raising the temperature of the server inlet point, using the SPEC power benchmark and developing a dashboard of datacenter energy efficiency metrics.