Liam's blog

In my second post, I will look at the merits of adding solar to the DC energy mix and the impact of water usage on the TCO.

When does chasing a low PUE start to cost money instead of saving you money?

Jonathan Koomey has recently updated his study on data centre energy consumption and the good news is that consumption has only seen half the predicted growth between 2005 and 2010. With everyone from Greenpeace to governments picking on data centre energy consumption this update makes some interesting reading, particularly the suggested causes of the lower than expected growth in Western markets.

There is an underlying problem in measuring IT work or data centre productivity. Until a general solution is found any further attempts at IT efficiency or data centre productivity metrics will be as subjective and user dependent as agreeing on the single set of ingredients and assembly method for the “perfect” sandwich.

A business's place in the carbon reduction league table bears little relation to how sustainable it really is.

The CRC has now grown up into a real tax. The previous plan to give back most of the money for carbon allowances as an incentive to improve efficiency has been scrapped, what are the impacts of this to the data centre industry and does this make the CRC better or worse?

There seems to be an endless comparison of the size of different data centres’ PUE. Whilst on the one hand this is encouraging as it demonstrates that the industry is facing up to the energy cost or environmental issues facing data centres, it is also a little depressing as the numbers are, in many cases pretty meaningless and not comparable. Why is this so, and what might we be able to do about it?

So, is cloud is really green and should you move all your IT into the cloud because it is much more efficient than running it yourself? If I am procuring IT services and one of my objectives is to manage the environmental impact of our IT then what can I do? I can’t use the CRC, I can’t use PUE and I definitely can’t rely on supplier marketing.

It is well known that one of the major contributors to data centre inefficiency is the cooling plant. Most data centres are air conditioned and this is accepted practice, with Air Conditioning bodies recommending the operating ranges but why is air conditioning necessary at all?

The dichotomy of metrics, we want simple metrics but when we simplify them they are no longer useful for anything. If we were to try and rank car insurers from “best” to “worst” for every customer the problems would be obvious so why are we trying to do this for data centres?