Research and Markets has announced the release of their “2011 Trends to Watch: Data Center Technologies” report.

The demand for increased flexibility from an organization’s IT capability is creating new challenges for data center management. Much of this new demand is coming from the changing nature of operating in an increasingly interconnected global market, where an organization’s performance is influenced by events that are mostly outside its direct control.

This research report looks at the explosion in end-user technology and the influence from the consumer market, the role of the data center and its strategic significance to the organization, and the transformational impact of virtualization extending beyond the IT department.  IT organizations will need to evolve to reflect the change in focus caused by new disruptive technologies.

During 2011, the role of the data center will begin to witness a dramatic shift, as the cloud computing era heralds a new dawn in the delivery and operation of IT services.

Key data center trends in 2011:

The transformational impact of Virtualization

• IT must move from being a cost doing business to a value creator
• Orchestrating IT supply in line with business demand requires business processes to be prioritized
• Changing the relationship between IT and business users requires a common language and a dialog of mutual benefit

IT organizations will need to evolve to reflect the change in focus caused by new disruptive technologies

• Redefining the “run the business” (RTB) operational cost model through the use of technology
• Ensuring that all processes operate at the required level of performance needs a holistic view of delivering IT

Re-focus on environmental impact

• Data center power and cooling appears a low priority for many organizations
• Virtualization is seen as the driving technology in the environmental debate

The Relevance of the Mainframe in data center technologies

• The mainframe will continue to be part of the current heterogeneous data center environment
• The ability to transform corporate data into actionable information
• The mainframe as the brains of the data center

The convergence of network technology

• The network is becoming the critical component in the data center
• Secure remote management (SRM) will assume greater significance in 2011
• IPV6 presents a new set of management challenges

The growth of automation

• Automation in 2011 will become more significant
• The level of adoption depends on organizational maturity
• Operational cost savings

Oracle published a whitepaper this year entitled “Consolidate Storage Infrastructure and Create a Greener Data Center“.  This whitepaper explores ways to improve efficiencies within your data center to achieve both cost and energy savings.

In addition to finding ways to cope with an expanding storage infrastructure, data center managers also have to:
- Providing continuous access to data stored on reliable and secure media
- Meet stringent compliance regulations that require longer data retention
- Create operational efficiency while simultaneously cutting costs

To maximize efficiency, companies must tier storage between high-cost, energy-inefficient disk drives and lower-cost, energy efficient,
long-term tape archive systems to manage the bottom line. In addition, many installed tape systems don’t provide mixed media support, partitioning, or library sharing, making it difficult for data centers to scale and share hardware and software to leverage existing resources and reduce operational costs. With the right tape storage technology, companies can consolidate multiple smaller systems onto larger solutions (or large systems onto fewer, higher-density solutions) and store more data at less cost.

An enterprise’s data represents one of its most important assets, so how that data is stored, accessed, and secured is of paramount importance. . Providing economies of scale, a sound storage consolidation strategy can lead to lower costs, less energy consumption, improved response times, better performance, increased capacity, and more.

Download the full whitepaper at Tech Republic.

Going green has gained a lot of attention recently, especially with the introduction of an energy tax credit for companies that demonstrate energy savings.

As you can imagine, being able to demonstrate that your data center has significantly reduced energy consumption is easier said than done.

Evolving Solutions is now offering a cutting edge service to its customers to measure real-time energy consumption on an ongoing basis. Temperature sensors are attached to cabinets in your data center and smart power strips that are IP enabled are used to measure how much power is being drawn.  All of this data is pumped into a Web portal along with a CAD drawing of the data center layout.  The output is a map of the data center with a data overlay showing which appliances are hot.  All of this happens in real time, which allows you to tactically see what’s happening in your data center and what you need to do to reduce energy consumption.

Some companies that are actively tracking energy consumption in this manner have also uncovered discrepancies with SLAs billing them too much.  They have the exact amount of energy consumed readily available and understand exactly how much they should be paying.

Contact Evolving Solutions to discover how you can increase energy efficiencies within your data center.

Grow A Greener Data Center by IT Architect Douglas Alger From Cisco

“Green IT is ultimately about resource efficiency – maximizing what you have and optimizing how it is consumed.  Beyond the admirable environmental benefits from being green, such optimization lets you accomplish more and spend less.”

This is just a sampling of the insight you’ll find below as our Data Center Leaders Interview Series details necessary tactics and quantifiable benefits for taking your data center green.  Helping us is Douglas Alger, IT Architect for Physical Infrastructure from Cisco and author of the book Grow A Greener Data Center.

For anyone who still feels that Green IT is simply an altruistic business fad nearing an end, rather than a significant strategy for saving capital and optimizing power usage, this interview is for you:

Evolving Solutions:
What tips would you offer for businesses prior to launching a Green IT initiative?

Douglas Alger:
Specific to  the Data Center space, I recommend having tools in place to monitor your Data Center resources.

Being able to track power consumption down to the cabinet level, temperature conditions, and hardware utilization is invaluable for developing and implementing Data Center green initiatives.

Monitoring tools can help uncover inefficiencies such as short-cycling of an air handler or which servers in your Data Center are consuming a disproportionate amount of power.  They also can help you prioritize potential improvements, calculate the return on investment, and – after implementation – accurately track efficiency gains.  Without them are you left to guess at the impact of the improvements you are making.

Evolving Solutions:
How would you recommend selling the idea of green IT to upper management who see it as little more than a fad?

Douglas Alger:
I think it’s important to emphasize that green IT is ultimately about resource efficiency – maximizing what you have and optimizing how it is consumed.  Beyond the admirable environmental benefits from being green, such optimization lets you accomplish more and spend less, conditions that are always going to be of interest to a company.

For Data Centers, being green saves money by reducing energy consumption (the largest operational expense of a Data Center) and cutting down on the use of consumable items such as patch cords.  Being green also extends the lifespan of your facility (deferring future construction costs), provides more flexibility to accommodate future technologies, and positions your company well in the event that environmental regulations around energy-efficiency or carbon emissions are enacted in the future.

Evolving Solutions:
With business movements that emerge quickly, such as Green, it is not uncommon for mistakes to be made due to rapid deployment.   What implementation mistakes have you witnessed, in regards to Green IT initiatives?

Douglas Alger:
Companies sometimes launch green initiatives without developing an overall strategy.  That’s fine for the short term and individual green projects can definitely be successful, but as more uncoordinated green activities are initiated you can end up with redundant efforts and other inefficiencies, especially at large companies.

Any green initiative that you can think of – recycling programs, promoting alternate transportation, server virtualization, etc. – are bound to accomplish more if they’re implemented as part an organized program with defined goals.

Evolving Solutions:
Your book, “Grow A Greener Data Center,” walks companies through a bottom-up approach to building a green data center, beginning with physical construction.  For companies that do not have the option to physically build a new data center, what do you recommend as an ideal starting point?

Douglas Alger:
There are a lot of green improvements that can be made to existing server environments that are very low cost, paying for themselves many times over, and easy to implement.  One simple step, for example, is to install timers and motion sensors on your Data Center lighting, causing non-emergency lights to turn off whenever the room is unoccupied.  (This can be done for other building spaces that are unoccupied for extended periods of time as well, such as conference rooms and bathrooms.)

If your Data Center’s power and cabling infrastructure are routed under a raised floor, seal any excess gaps at the floor tile openings where patch cords and power cables enter the plenum space.   This will improve the performance of your cooling system, reducing your energy consumption.

Yet another green improvement that can be implemented unobtrusively is to make energy-efficiency a key purchasing criteria for hardware that goes in your Data Center.  Newer, more energy efficient devices can be introduced as part of your company’s normal refresh cycle for hardware.  This can lead to significant savings over time.  When you factor in a server’s cooling needs and the conversion losses that occur along a Data Center’s power delivery chain, your energy savings will ultimately be nearly three times the number of watts you conserve at the hardware level.

Evolving Solutions:
Toby Velte, Global Technology Strategies with Microsoft, describes how he helps to ensure Green IT initiatives are funded by always relating projects to the pressures of capitalism, rather than the pressures of altruism.  Do you find this to be true across the board, or have you seen some firms consider start to implement green IT purely from a sense of corporate responsibility?

Douglas Alger:
I have seen businesses undertake green activities because they want to do the right thing, but I agree that if you want to truly entrench green initiatives within your company you need to demonstrate their business value.  When budgets get tight, upper management is more likely to cut a “feel good” program than one known to contribute in a proven way to the company’s success.

Evolving Solutions:
Wild Card:  Anything else you would like to add?

Douglas Alger:
Some people don’t immediately associate Data Centers with opportunities to be green.  With the tremendous consumption that occurs in these facilities, though – often 20 to 40 times the energy usage of traditional office space – there are ample opportunities to be more efficient and thereby save energy, save money, and reduce your carbon footprint.