Analyst: IT vendors answering calls for green data centers

IT vendors like IBM and HP are responding to increasing enterprise concerns over data center energy consumption, according to Graham Titterington, principal analyst at global consulting firm Ovum.

"IBM announced enterprise additions to its Project Big Green, a week after HP announced its Sustainability Laboratory," Titterington says. "The HP announcement included long-term data center issues while IBM concentrated on new product releases to address this area."

Despite both vendors' different approaches in addressing the data center energy issue, Titterington notes "large areas of agreement and overlap" in their 'green' philosophies.

"Both HP and IBM recognize that energy use has become a high-level concern for enterprises," he says. "Both also see an immediate opportunity for savings in energy use with a strong financial investment case through monitoring and intelligent control systems."

According to Titterington, IBM expects investments in this area to be recouped in less than two years, based on case studies. However, he notes that the 'environmental payback' period may be longer where hardware replacement is concerned.

Exponential data growth

Enterprise demands on information processing systems are growing at an exponential rate. For example, replacing photos with richer presentation media like videos has raised the bar for effective data management.

"IBM expects server usage to grow six-fold and the volume of stored data to grow 70-fold over the next decade," Titterington says. "These figures are consistent with Ovum's research."

He adds that with technology delivering "linear" efficiency improvements, data center energy consumption is still rising rapidly. "In the longer term, we need changes in business processes, data retention practice and law, and a change in expectations."

Titterington stresses that enterprises need to question the current tendency to hold all data as far as technology permits. "We need systems that can store a single copy of a document and not replicate it multiple times across the organization, without placing complexity on users."

HP approach

According to Titterington, HP Labs has designated sustainable computing as one of its long-term focus areas. The development of optical computing is also on the software giant's agenda. "This is an important element in HP's long-term objective of cutting data center energy usage by 75 per cent."

Titterington says that the replacement of copper by fiber optic cable carrying laser signals will enable "major energy savings" in data center communications, and eventually in the processor chip.

"Meanwhile, HP claims it has achieved a 40 percent energy saving at a new data center recently built in India's Bangalore city by deploying its 'smart cooling' technology," he says.