Recently in Green IT Category

The Economist recently tackled the trend around cloud computing and the issue of energy usage in datacentres. It's amazing to think that datacentres collectively now create more carbon emissions than Argentina or the Netherlands. The author of the article is slightly cynical about hardware makers who are hyping the issue and suggests that datacenter owners are burying their heads in the sand as far as their inherent inefficiency is concerned.

And rightly so, because the challenges within the datacentre go far deeper than simply the hardware and energy they use. We're likely to see a sea-change in the way datacentres are run. As the rate of growth in datacentre-usage keeps sky-rocketing, datacentres are not only going to have to learn to cope with growing energy consumption, but they're going to be challenged to optimise how services are run and maximise capacity. To that end, we've started thinking about how BSM can contribute to the datacentre environment.

The considerable disadvantage that datacentre administrators face, now (and particularly with the advent of technologies such as virtualisation) is that they don't know what applications use what servers. One huge problem that datacentres - and indeed the wider IT community faces - is that when it comes to the wide-scale management of software, companies fail to understand how software interrelates and crucially, the relationship between IT assets and the commercial value of the services they provide. Without the ability to understand this, datacentres have little chance of powering down components that are commercially not critical. They have even less chance of prioritising, from a business perspective, the usage of each component and correcting issues that arise.

Until datacentres develop to the point that they can understand the commercial value of services on both a macro and a granular level, they won't be able to control change within their systems, or pinpoint the impact of potential changes. They certainly won't be able to report to their customers that they are saving the planet.

Sean

As the Internet titans struggle to find more cost effective methods of keeping their datacenters cool, while simultaneously lowering their impact on the environment, I can’t help but smile. No I’m not insensitive the impending crisis that is global warming – to the contrary, I am a big believer in thinking globally and acting locally. It’s just that those of us in the field of BSM have already been executing on this global-local philosophy for years:sweeping, expensive measures aren’t always the best remedy – sometimes you just need to improve how you use what you already have.

Several years ago I was asked to provide some consulting services to a customer, an unnamed manufacturer, with a plant in Canada that desperately needed a solution to a simple but a very expensive problem. The servers in the datacenter that hosted the technology controlling the operation of the assembly line had to maintain a temperature that did not vary above or below a (+/-) 5 degree Celsius. If it did the servers would automatically shut themselves down to prevent overheating. With a vehicle rolling off the production line every 27 seconds, any stoppages on the manufacturing line had a clear and measurable impact on revenue.

Some proposals called for grand schemes to overhaul the datacenter with sweeping and sophisticated new solutions…until I arrived and offered a simple answer: integrate the tools you already have to develop an early warning system to monitor the temperature in the datacenter.

The HVAC systems already installed in the datacenter had onboard SNMP servers, which allowed a periodic polling of the datacenter temperature at three different points. The outcome of this poll was correlated to the required mean temperature in the datacenter – and a severity level for the production floor then conveyed to the Center. For example, if the temperature varied more than 2 degrees Celsius either way, IT operations staff was automatically paged and the manager on duty received an email on his blackberry. In just a week after installing this very simple early warning system, the number of production line stops was reduced by over 90 percent.

This situation was perfect for a BSM solution which is designed to integrate and correlate IT and business data and visualize it in a way that is meaningful to the business. More importantly, it exemplifies what is often symptomatic of a larger problem: providing a way for IT to understand that given current course and speed, a crash will occur in X-number of minutes. Whether it’s global warming or cooling the datacenter, sometimes we already have the ends of a solution in our hands – we just need to tie them together.

-- Jonathan