CIO's Face A New Problem: IT Energy Crunch

IT energy crunch anyone? Well it has long been talked about and now it's clearly here. Today's CIO's faced with demands to offer tighter security protection but not at the loss of productivity are now facing an even tougher foe in the data center!

Today's data centers are growing by leaps and bounds. The OEM's (Original Equipment Manufacturers) like HP, IBM, EMC and others are working to reduce demands on electricity through innovative designs in future technologies. Trusting that they will place their marketing hats to the side and collectively mount a serious industry wide effort is questionable.

However, if competition creates innovation towards a global answer then let the competition begin as we are running out of ticks in the clock as a society thrusting for more data driven by technology dependent on electricity. But what about today? What about next week's storage demands and today's technology? There are many stories floating around about available budget for capital procurement (not everywhere now) but no room in the electrical outlet.

Believe it or not there are still doubters out there that believe we do not have an IT energy crunch problem. We aim to differ on this one considerably.

As CIO's face day to day struggles for secure communications and the convergence of voice and data they are truly looking at the energy consumption forecast more now than ever. The game has changed and companies must become fiscally responsible as well as energy green. The PC manufacturers are racing Green PC's to market in an effort to solve part of the problem. But in the traditional data center there is mounting evidence that we are out of gas so-to-speak when it comes to electricity demands presently and forecasted.

The web has linked us all together with zeroes and ones but guess what? All of this must get stored and then accessed and oh yes stored offsite for data protection and forgive me for saying this but SOX Compliance. The evil watchdog of our C Executives. Oh the price we pay for those that have cheated the public. That's a whole other topic and forgive me for straying.

The IT energy crunch is real and it's not going away. In fact it will get worse and some say much worse as the demands on computing and thus information in general is going more and more off paper. Nice side benefit to our tree’s but a problem of great magnitude for our way of doing business and ecommerce in the future. When I look at the simplistic view of the problem it’s hard not to think Solar Energy. Every building has a roof and clearly multiple sides facing the sun. Cosmetic issues, of course, but soon this may not be a problem if we keep consuming at the present rate of growth.

IT energy crunch solution time is a hot topic. We need to get collaborative solutions from the Network providers to the storage companies. By integrating our R&D in a parallel sense we may be able to solve the over arching problem facing our future growth and thus demands on the electrical needs. So, as your CIO’s are getting more demands placed on their desk we all need to take a step back and find energy efficient ways to move our society and technology needs forward.

Innovations in the software field is showing great promise in helping to understand and provide better data center designs that behave better in an IT energy crunch future. No simple answers here and tremendous pressure on the OEM's to spend the precious research dollars on green initiatives that result in improved IT energy crunch solutions that allow uninterrupted growth for future generations to come.

Expansion vs Reality

Today's operations staff is facing major decision barriers with respect to normalizing growth requirements and energy capacity. Working to solve these issues is not easy. For one, the operations management teams do not (in most cases) design or manufacture the technology they require. Thus they are forced to buy from other vendors that enhance their overall product line from industry trends and marketing data. The good news to all of this is that most of these companies, IBM™, HP™, EMC™ and SUN™, to name a few, have listened and begun implementing Green Technologies throughout their product lines. This is a classic example of the chicken and the egg. There are powerfull technologies available today that most end user customers would love to implement. However, when they look at their current utility bill or even worse their overall capacity usage in today's terms they are forced to sit on the sidelines and watch or wait for similar less energy consuming technologies to become available.

How is the effecting the productivity of the work force? It is too soon to tell in most cases although there are reports of stalled projects/programs due to poor energy management and thus no available capacity to expand. This is liable to continue well into 2008 as the newer technologies are not all there yet and more testing and certifying is needed to truly gain a footing on whether or not the movement to a Green Technology world has arrived.

Return home from our IT Energy Crunch discussion

Virtualization

As more and more planning discussions are focusing on available power consumption needs the shift in thinking appears to be in minimizing growth at the server level. Storage is storgage and thus the technology will continue to push the yields in the media but servers are a whole other problem area.

So, in order to address the need for more server horsepower when available electrcity is shrinking the best way to to this is to apply techniques whereby the existing hardware investment can be stretched.

Companies providing virtualization and thus allowing hardware to split it's own operating capability within the existing investment is an exploding area of interest within the IT community. Companies such as (recent IPO) VMware located in Palo Alto are pioneers in this field and a growing sense of interest in the day to day planning discussions of the future designs for a data center.

Microsoft and other companies are also hedging their investment dollars towards virtualization but this is truly a double edge sword for them and customers have a distrust in their intentions. VMware is solely on this planet to produce virtualization solutions and thus a trusted partner with respect to energy efficient decision related to IT energy crunch topics.