While most of India is facing an acute shortage of power, while we suffer from frequent power loss at home, office seems to be better with no power outages et all.
But now since our enterprises are aware that they are also at the edge of the power crisis, there is a desperate effort to save energy.
Consider ICICI where I work and spend most of my day, there is increased awareness to save power. Its mandatory to switch of monitors when not at desk and also power off PC’s at EOD. This has led to 15% savings in power. Switching off lights and restricting internet access post 6pm has helped dissuade employees from idling away at office after work hours unless required.
Considering the huge IT infrastructure we posses, our CIO has initiated a drive to buy energy saving computers.
The Cool Thread servers from Sun Microsystems is a big step towards this initiative, these servers have greater power packed into less rackspace. They help save 50% on power and cooling requirements. The revolutionary Niagara processor has 8 cores and 4 threads per core, helping consolidate more applications onto one server. This helps in de-inducting more servers.
Click here to calculate your power savings with Cool Threads servers
Talking about consolidation, the process is a power saver in disguise. Consolidation helps in retiring old bulky servers by moving apps to small energy efficient, powerful and smart hardware.
Storing petabytes of information is yet another challenge, the huge disk arrays are up and running 24×7 consuming a lot of power. Mr. David Scott (CEO pf 3PAR) exclaims “While it is true that many enterprises are reducing energy costs and environmental impact through using larger, more efficient drives, mechanical improvements to storage arrays can only improve power consumption so much. At some point, data centers need to address the most egregious source of waste: poor capacity utilization. With average “written data” disk utilization rate estimates ranging from as little as 10-25%, more than half of the disks quietly humming away in the world’s data centers are effectively wasted. But they are not only wasted—they are also responsible for wasting valuable resources: the resources required to house, power and cool them.”
3PAR is a pioneer in thin provisioning, wherein you can provision as much storage as you want without actually having the raw disk capacity.
While computers and peripherals become an integral part of our lives and the sources of energy depleting faster than our imagination, we are in for a lot of thought on, how to exchange information and still save power.