ENERGY AND EFFICIENCY
Putting Energy Efficiency on the Agenda
Power Resilience
By: Robin Koffler of Thamesgate Group
Introduction
Robin Koffler charts
the development of
DCIM packages and
modular UPS systems.
Sometimes concepts that once seemed
high-level and exclusively for the
big players start quickly percolating
down to smaller concerns. Two such
concepts – virtualisation and cloudbased services – are ever more rapidly
becoming adopted by a wider variety of
organisations.
Anyone storing or sharing documents
today is more than likely using one of
the main cloud platforms: Dropbox,
Google Drive, Amazon Cloud Drive
or Microsoft’s OneDrive. These
services run from complex data centres,
themselves running virtualised server
environments. Those lucky enough to
visit one of these data centres would
witness the very best in power, cooling,
server utilization and, more than likely,
energy efficiency. Such data centres
may be certified to a specific Tier-level
by the Uptime Institute and will often
proudly quote their PUE (power usage
efficiency) ratio.
What happens in smaller
organisations further down the chain
though? Firstly resilience starts to
reduce. Smaller data centres cannot
afford the size of investments needed to
give full redundancy to critical power
and cooling elements. As the facility size
shrinks, electrical bills reduce so issues
such as PUE and energy efficiency
start to slide down the agenda. Is this a
trend that’s likely to continue in the face
of rising energy costs and an electrical
supply in the UK becoming less
reliable? More than likely not, thanks to
developments in two key areas: DCIM
packages and modular UPS systems.
DCIM – Data Centre Infrastructure
Management – is a platform for the
monitoring and control of an entire IT
environment. Expensive to implement
and requiring the right sensors and
monitoring enabled platforms, DCIM
has always looked like a solution seeking
a problem to solve. This is changing and
perhaps from a not such obvious angle.
Energy Management
Switch manufacturers such as Cisco
now offer an Energy Management
Suite that allows IT managers to
potentially reduce their energy costs by
35 per cent. Their system can monitor
and control power usage to every
server, router, switch, laptop, monitor,
IP Phone, wireless access point and
printer around an enterprise and help
IT managers to optimise productivity
and uptime. Other manufacturers offer
similar functionality or very soon will.
The point is that the package allows for
energy monitoring, which previously
was only available to larger organisations
and data centres.
Although implementing energy
efficiency programmes may only be
obligatory for companies falling inside
the boundary for ESOS (Energy Saving
Opportunities Scheme), the Cisco
Energy Management Suite allows
smaller organisations to take a positive
step towards reducing energy costs,
something previously prohibitively
expensive to