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March 03, 2011
Appliance Deployment Focused on Reduced Energy Consumption Worth Investigation
By Jamie Epstein, TMCnet Web Editor
The concept of appliance deployment often ignites the debate over energy consumption in the data center, as this has been a key focus for companies seeking to reduce their cost of operation.
A recent NEI (News - Alert) white paper focused on the concept of energy consumption and how the enterprise is seeking ways to become more powerful and improve performance, all while reducing overall costs.
The idea of “going green” emerged a few years ago and while some companies immediately paid attention to the environmental impact they could make by changing their energy consumption, most waited until the rising costs of power and cooling forced IT organizations to take a harder look at becoming more efficient—in terms of their power consumption.
The biggest challenge in the data center is to determine the best approach to appliance deployment, while also increasing utilization, availability and computing densities—while they also attempt to lower costs.
Among the three biggest power consumers in the enterprise, servers are at the top of the list, followed by HVAC and disk storage systems. As such, one of the most popular approaches to energy savings today is virtualization of servers.
The green movement is now taking on more attention, as more than just environmentalists and governments are taking an enhanced interest. Many governments are focusing on data center consolidation as a means to become more energy efficient, as the data center can require as much as 100 times more energy per square foot than a typical office building.
Another key focus has been on operating systems and computer hardware, and the U.S. Department of Energy is working with green industry associations to prepare standards and create tools to improve measuring and data center efficiency. One appliance deployment under rapid development is a smart end-to-end DC power architecture that will convert Alternating Current utility power, to DC further upstream inside the data center.
These DC architectures are expected to eventually replace existing equipment, as well as provide a better measurement and reporting of electrical use throughout the data center. To accomplish this, there are specific infrastructure requirements that an end-to-end DC Data center must have.
Recent technological advancements by Dell and NEI at the server and appliance application level can help the data center focus on appliance deployment that will make the organization much more energy efficient. The advantages from the elimination of AC-to-DC conversions can help to improve data center efficiencies by as much as 10 percent or more, which makes an investigation into such methods well worth the time.
Jamie Epstein is a TMCnet Web Editor. Previously she interned at News 12 Long Island as a reporter's assistant. After working as an administrative assistant for a year, she joined TMC (News - Alert) as a Web editor for TMCnet. Jamie grew up on the North Shore of Long Island and holds a bachelor's degree in mass communication with a concentration in broadcasting from Five Towns College. To read more of her articles, please visit her columnist page.
Edited by Jamie Epstein
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