The concept of green buildings is getting increasing attention as companies look to promote sustainable development strategies and high-performance, energy efficient buildings. They achieve this by using benchmarks from the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) from the U.S. Green Building Council. This momentum is driven by more than global awareness or corporate responsibility. In truth the term green has a dual meaning, reflecting both the environmental and economic benefits. Reducing an organization’s energy footprint is emerging as a key cross-disciplinary strategic focus with the potential for substantial long term cost savings.

Managers of data centers within the financial services sector often find themselves facing more immediate and acute power challenges than other enterprises. Power density in data centers is increasing exponentially as new technology is introduced. Blade servers, storage devices and multi-processor servers all consume substantially more power than the technology they replace. Increased power consumption creates heat requiring more cooling and further escalating energy costs. Gartner predicts that energy costs will increase their share of IT budgets from 10% to 30% and that by 2008 more than 50% of large organizations will spend more on annual IT energy bills than on servers.

As a result of this trend, data center managers are beginning to take a holistic approach which treats the data center as an integral ‘system’ to be planned and managed in the same manner as the equipment that resides within. This approach addresses the current imbalance between energy efficiency and scalability and brings together best practices across both the facilities and IT domains. The potential exists for substantial benefits; however, as the axiom goes, you can’t manage what you can’t measure. The need exists for metrics, frameworks and tools to address data center power strategy and provide a common set of guidelines and best practices.

Various industry efforts are underway to institute common measurement approaches. Sun Microsystems is promoting their Space, Watts and Performance (SWaP) metric, a measure of relative server efficiency. By weighing performance against power consumption and space utilization the metric provides a more accurate and holistic measure of the efficiency of rack-optimized systems. While useful, SWaP is too narrowly focused on servers and too tightly tied to Sun’s product line.

An industry consortium, The Green Grid (http://thegreengrid.org), is taking a more comprehensive approach. Broadly represented by companies including Dell, HP, IBM, AMD, Intel, APC, Microsoft, Sun and VMWare, the group is chartered with establishing “meaningful, platform-neutral standards, measurement methods, processes and new technologies to improve energy efficient performance of global data centers.” In the short term, The Green Grid is promoting two related metrics: Power Utilization Effectiveness (PUE) and Data Center Efficiency (DCE). PUE is defined as Total Facility Power (including Power Distribution Units, generators, UPS and cooling systems) divided by IT Equipment Power (including all IT equipment such as servers, storage devices and network switches), while DCE is the reciprocal measure (1/PUE). The measures provide benchmarks for comparing the overall energy efficiency of data centers, establishing trends and measuring the effectiveness of design changes. Longer term, the group is looking to enhance the utility of those measures by adding additional granularity while also looking to advance a more sophisticated metric: Data Center Power Efficiency (DCPE) which divides Useful Work by Total Facility Power. In addition, The Green Grid plans to work with the industry to establish energy efficiency guidelines for all data center equipment.

The government is getting into the act as well. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has begun a six-month study of data center power consumption, as required by the recently passed HR 5646. The study will be an extension of the existing Energy Star program and will examine trends and best practices and encourage the development of energy efficient data centers. It will provide guidelines for the private sector and drive efforts to reduce IT energy costs throughout the U.S. government.

Clearly, the issue of data center power consumption is becoming an increasingly critical cost driver. By proactively focusing resources in this area and leveraging emerging metrics and best practices financial services organizations can effectively reduce cost, mitigate risk and enhance agility.

Craig Teahen is Director and Practice Manager for

Data Center Solutions at Acumen Solutions (www.acumensolutions.com), a business and technology consulting firm with offices across the U.S. and in Europe. Acumen Solutions promotes their own internal green policy at their corporate locations. Mr. Teahen may be contacted via email at: cteahen@acumensolutions.com.