Modius Data Center Blog

I was flipping through the 2007 report to congress issued by Jonathan Koomey ("Report to Congress on Server and Data Center Energy Efficiency Public Law 109-431") and on Page 10 came across a very easy to read, but impactful diagram which provides some great insight into the future of the IT industry, and can be discussed in terms of end-users as well.

I suspect that this chart could be applied more or less to ANY individual company in their quest for energy efficiency. If there is some level of 'greening' at play in a corporation, then this chart can be a crystal ball into your 5 possible futures.

You can see from the diagram varying impacts on energy consumption, (starting at the top) going from taking NO NEW ACTION, all the way through DOING EVERYTHING POSSIBLE. I would suggest today that most companies are somewhere approaching the "Improved Operations Scenerio". If you look above, you'll see this green curve essentially takes the overhead out of operations, but does very little to have any significant long term effect on the SLOPE of the curve.

In the chart, the "State of the Art Scenerio" is a good depiction of what is POSSIBLE (expected) if all business processes are tuned and all equipment is refreshed with the latest. This would create a real-time infrastructure ("RTI" as defined by Gartner) that self-tunes itself based upon demand. Most importantly... It would also lower the most basic cost per transaction. A CPU cycle would actually cost less!

These are very exciting times ahead...

Over the past year, many customers have found themselves in the midst of very real ‘Sustainability’, ‘Eco-efficiency’ or ‘Green’ initiatives. The core requirement of these initiatives is to establish energy and efficiency baselines to ultimately determine how energy is being used and where optimizations can be made to improve performance. These are very visible, corporate governance-style initiatives which tend to appear in quarterly reports. Both the CIO and CFO are very serious about taking proactive steps to demonstrate and report where investments are being made to get this skyrocketing cost under control.

One of the areas being investigated deals with the various types of instrumentation available within the modern data center. More specifically, the CIO/CFO are looking for their IT management team to take advantage of available tools, setting up a well-defined means to monitor all available energy-related data points in real-time and building an ITIL-inspired run-book of “continuous optimization,” more commonly refered to as “operational intelligence.”

It can be shown that modern data centers are complex systems with a tremendous quantity of physical infrastructure devices already in place: some are components with monitoring capabilities built-in, some with monitoring features optionally available, and finally others without any monitoring capabilities whatsoever. IT Managers are now realizing that more real-time monitoring is always better to help make better informed decisions to support these ‘Greening’ initiatives. Granular, concise, real-time information will allow trends to be seen, thresholds to be set, and plans to be made. Tactically, there are various approaches to device instrumentation and most IT situations will actually require a combination of several instrumentation technologies to work together, allowing a complete picture of status, availability, capacity and efficiency.

It is critically important to note that the current less-than-optimal state of active energy monitoring through instrumentation within the modern data center is a direct result of the historical complexity to do so. There has been a complete lack of comprehensive distributed enterprise-class solutions to gather, analyze, and make informed energy management decisions across the litany of raw data sources.

Ultimately, the technology to provide this continuous monitoring of vast discreet sources of data points is now available to be deployed and consumed at will. In support of these corporate initiatives, looking forward is critical because the game has changed, dramatically. The stakes are higher. The players have stepped up.