I ran across a great article the other day by Dan Woods on Forbes' blog (you can find it here).  In it, Dan articulates eleven power-related issues that the IT industry as a whole is wrestling with today and that should be top-of-mind for all CIOs. No surprise since the price of power continues to rise with no end in sight.  To Dan’s list, I’d like to add a few additional business concerns commonly discussed at recent IT industry forums and practitioner summits. Looking at all of the moving parts, a pattern starts to emerge of critically important energy issues that have been ignored for far too long:

-- How much energy does my IT structure consume and who consumes it (location, project, organization, etc.)?

-- How do I know what is working well and what is not? What was my baseline usage last year? What is it today and what would it be at the same growth velocity a year from now?

-- How frequently do I monitor my power usage and how frequently should I monitor it?

-- How 'full' are my company's data centers?  (Not just physical space, but power and cooling.)  Can I add a new business application? Where is it best to add this new application?

-- Do I know where my servers are working hard and efficiently?  Conversely, do I know where I have orphaned or zombied servers consuming 70+% of their maximal operating power but doing nothing?

-- Do I know how to determine ROI for data center efficiency projects, inclusive of my power and cooling costs?

And lastly...

-- Do I have a roadmap or a comprehensive plan regarding data center power management?

The last item is the key.  Do you have a plan?  Although the complexity and scope of your energy roadmap can vary based on a number of factors (one size certainly does not fit all), all IT shops need to have a power plan.  Your CIO needs it.  Your CFO and CEO need it, too. I know it’s possible. Just look inside any larger corporation and you can find entire purchasing organizations focused on minimizing the costs associated with acquiring assets. So why do they ignore Power, which is soon to be HALF of the entire cost of running a data center? They ignore it because there has not been a plan that accounts for it. Power has been buried in the ‘overhead’ line items, a miscellaneous category for things that are not actively managed.

Establishing the proper energy-monitoring infrastructure is the first step to creating an energy roadmap. The roadmap must include specific callouts for monitoring as well as control. Monitoring is no small task, since the number of points can be huge, tens of thousands or more. A quick rule of thumb is AT LEAST ONE monitored point for every square foot of space is required to gain full awareness about energy, power and environmental. That scale creates it’s own set of challenges in collection, repository and presentation. Distributed technologies like the EnergyCloud System from Racktivity can contribute to that power plan with provision for this kind of scale.  Enterprise-wide, EnergyCloud aggregates physical and logical energy metrics from the devices upwards.  More importantly, EnergyCloud presents the information in a clear and concise way.

Remember, power is no longer trivial in cost and data center power costs will exceed new server acquisition costs in just a year or two from now.  Technologies exist today that can provide this level of detailed visibility across vast IT footprints. The thing that is missing in most cases is an energy czar, leader or visionary that is looking to consider leading-edge solutions to this relatively new challenge. Someone willing to get involved actively and set direction, document and execute a plan.

About Mark Harris

Mark Harris has spent the last 25 years supplying data center solutions to the Fortune 5000 and is a recognized and published thought-leader in the energy management and monitoring space.

Over the most recent 10 years, Mark has been squarely focused on Energy distribution and management within the datacenter with such companies as Cyclades Corp, Avocent (News - Alert) Inc. and Raritan Computer.

Prior to these energy management providers, Mark held various senior management marketing, channels and sales roles in such notable companies as Digital Equipment Corporation (now HP), Extreme Networks and Cabletron (now Enterasys (News - Alert)).

Mark has been a member of The Green Grid since its inception, and holds a Computer Engineering / Electrical Engineering degree from Arizona State University. He considers himself to be a Californian through and through, enjoying everything California has to offer.