With the hike in electricity costs imminent, the emphasis will swing to energy saving in corporate data centres, says Andy Robb, chief technology officer at Duxbury Networking.
“The challenge for companies will be to minimise capital expenditure by incorporating new energy-saving solutions in regular upgrades and planned maintenance programmes rather than in 'fork-lift' upgrades,” he says.
“In the US, the Environmental Protection Agency reports that when energy conservation 'best practices' are introduced, data centre energy consumption can be reduced by 50%.”
Robb spotlights new-generation network switches designed to optimise data, voice and video traffic in virtualised and cloud computing environments.
“Modern switches have the ability to ensure high availability while helping to lower data centre energy costs through the efficient use of Power over Ethernet (POE) performance.
“POE design allows the switch to provision power in small increments and use only enough power to facilitate current convergence-enabled devices, thus reducing operational costs associated with power and cooling,” explains Robb.
He adds that in the data centre of tomorrow, the total cost of ownership of IT investments against performance will be constantly measured.
“Products that offer a perfect balance on both counts, enabling organisations to simultaneously improve productivity and reduce costs, will be the most successful.”
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