The data centre goes green

HP's technology investments will ready it for financial upturn as the economic climate starts to stabilise, the company says.

The Converged Infrastructure Roadshow, which started in SA yesterday, will visit 22 cities all over the world, as part of HP's plans to broadcast its message around converged infrastructure and virtualisation to customers.

Duncan Campbell, vice-president of converged infrastructure, HP Enterprise Servers and Networking, said IT sprawl has left business at the breaking point. “2010 will be the breakthrough year for virtual client computing. This year, for the first time, virtual servers have outpaced physical servers.”

Campbell pointed out that HP is investing heavily in energy-efficient technology research, citing cooling and power consumption as the biggest challenge IT departments face, coupled with increasing electricity costs.

However, he noted that IT departments are turning to green technology mainly to drive business benefits and reduce costs, rather than solely as a social responsibility tactic.

“Every dollar that people spend on IT is being matched by a dollar spent on cooling. The number one data centre issue is power and cooling and we've found that 98% of IT departments will change their data centres to deal with the power and cooling issues.

“Data centre capacity is limiting IT growth. Energy cost is the fastest growing part of operational expenses and government and corporate policies have set out requirements for carbon dioxide emissions to be monitored.”

Campbell said real-time visualisation of a data centre's energy consumption is critical. He noted that HP Data Centre Environmental Edge is real-time solution for energy monitoring and viewing energy consumption.

“It gives an indication where the hot spots are in the data centre and where to place all the assets. At the end of the day, you can reduce facility power and cooling costs and you can reclaim facility energy capacity for future growth,” explained Campbell.