How to Cut IT Energy Consumption Using Business Service Management (
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Imagine
buying a case of soda for a party at your place Friday night. You
discover your refrigerator is full, so you buy another refrigerator and
put it in the garage to store the soda. Then you buy a few cases of
other drinks—and another refrigerator. You buy some hors d'oeuvres and,
of course, another refrigerator. By the time the
party is over, you have five refrigerators in the garage, each one
containing a few leftover items. Each one is running 24/7 to keep those
items cold. And, month after month, you're paying for the power those
refrigerators consume.
Over the years, IT has done
pretty much the same thing with servers. They weren't really
being frivolous, as in the case of the refrigerators. After all, IT
truly has been under intense pressure to implement an expanding number
of new business services—services that are critical the success of the
enterprise. To provide those services, ensure
reliability and guarantee enough capacity for peak times, IT staff has
typically added hundreds, maybe even thousands of servers over the
years. Each one, however, is seriously underutilized. Some enterprises
have even found servers that were consuming power but no longer
providing any service at all.
As a result of all these servers,
power consumption in IT has skyrocketed. So have energy costs. One CIO
of a global investment bank, for example, discovered that his company
was paying nearly $2 million a year to power its computing systems.
What's more, he learned that the IT energy cost per square foot was
more than 15 times that of other departments.
So, just how can companies tackle
this challenge? Very few have the capital budget to replace current
equipment with newer, green versions that consume much less energy.
Fortunately, there is a practical way to achieve green IT objectives
while increasing efficiency.
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