links for 2008-09-25

Buying’s better, writes CIOUpdate guest columnist Paul Burns of Enterprise Management Associates.

The SLA is a joint goal between the IT Service Provider and the Customer. Although penalties do reduce costs and they do send a strong signal to service providers to improve their service, neither you nor the service provider “win” if an SLA is missed. Think of an SLA as a shared goal.

My final suggestion for reducing IT energy consumption is the trend toward IT equipment vendors offering power consumption information at the server blade level. Only a few years ago, the only thing a Data Center manager had to worry about was IT equipment security and reliability. But because of this increased awareness on Green IT and the environmental and economic benefits derived from it, IT managers are now more concerned with energy usage and metrics. Look for data center energy Business Service Management (BSM) metrics for things like power consumed by server, off peak power loads, energy saving feature deployment and other similar measurements - right next to CPU utilization and the number of transactions processed by an application.