While much of the IT industry focuses on CO2 emissions footprints, data management software and electrical power consumption, cooling and ventilation of IT data centers is an area of focus associated with "Green IT" as well as a means to address more effective use of electrical energy that can yield rapid results for many environments. Large tier-1 vendors including HP and IBM among others who have a IT and data center wide focus have services designed to perform quick assessments as well as detailed analysis and re-organization of IT data center physical facilities to improve air flow and power consumption for more effective cooling of IT technologies including servers, storage, networks and other equipment.

Similar to your own residence, basic steps to improve your cooling effectiveness can lead to use of less energy to reduce your budget impact, or, enable you to do more with what you already have with your cooling capacity to support growth, acquisitions and or consolidation initiatives. Vendors are also looking at means and alternatives for cooling IT equipment ranging from computer assisted computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software analysis of data center cooling and ventilation to refrigerated cooling racks some leveraging water or inert liquid cooling.

Various metrics exists and others are evolving for measuring, estimating, reporting, analyzing and discussing IT Data Center infrastructure resource topics including servers, storage, networks, facilities and associated software management tools from a power, cooling and green environmental standpoint. The importance of metrics is to focus on the larger impact of a piece of IT equipment that includes its cost and energy consumption that factors in cooling and other hosting or site environmental costs. Naturally energy costs and CO2 (carbon offsets) will vary by geography and region along with type of electrical power being used (Coal, Natural Gas, Nuclear, Wind, Thermo, Solar, etc) and other factors that should be kept in perspective as part of the big picture.

What's your power, cooling, floor space, energy, environmental or green story? Do you have questions or want to learn more about energy issues pertaining to IT data center and data infrastructure topics? Do you have a solution or technology or a success story that you would like to share with us pertaining to data storage and server I/O energy optimization strategies?  Do you need assistance in developing, validating or reviewing your strategy or story? Contact us at: green@storageio.com or 651-275-1563 to learn more about green data storage and server I/O or to schedule a briefing to tell us about your energy efficiency and effectiveness story pertaining to IT data centers and data infrastructures.

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