Best practices for data center efficiencies

Data centers and other IT systems are beginning to pose one of the world's great environmental challenges as their energy consumption continues to expand. As businesses take a wide variety of steps to reduce power needs, researchers around the world are looking for new ways to improve data center energy efficiency.

Analysts are beginning to look at the characteristics of applications running in a data center in their search for improved efficiencies, writes Barbara Pernici, a professor of Computer Engineering at the Politecnico di Milano, in a post at TheInfoBoom blog. A European research project called Green Active Management of IT Service Centres is studying these characteristics and context-aware adaptive features.

The European Union's best practices for data centers not only encourage server consolidation, virtualization and dynamic server management, but also the creation of low-power techniques when it comes to IT components, Pernici writes. Improving facility design to make heating and cooling processes more efficient is also recommended. 

The U.S. Internal Revenue Service provides a concrete example of the importance of this third area of best practices for data centers. Poor design at two of the tax agency's data centers is wasting millions of dollars, according to a report by the inspector general for tax administration at the Department of the Treasury. Some of the problems include: Lack of sensors for controlling lighting, lack of sub-metering for monitoring energy use, missing floor tiles, and inconsistency in the way server rows are spaced, reports Elizabeth Montalbano in an article at InformationWeek.

For more:
- see Barbara Pernici's post at TheInfoBoom
- see Elizabeth Montalbano's article at InformationWeek

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