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By Steve Ranger, 25 September 2009 17:11

NEWS

Datacentre and IT chiefs aren't paying enough attention to measuring, monitoring and modelling energy use in datacentres - and unless they do, they will not be able to cut their energy costs and meet compliance requirements, according to analyst Gartner.

The analyst group said its research found that although IT managers think datacentre energy management is their most important green IT issue for the next 18 months, few consider green procurement and pushing vendors to create more energy-efficient products as their top priority.

Rakesh Kumar, research VP at Gartner said that although the green IT and datacentre energy issue has been on the agenda for some time, many managers feel that they have to deal with more-immediate concerns.

He said that even if more energy efficient servers or energy management tools were available, datacentre and IT managers are far more interested in internal projects like consolidation, rationalisation and virtualisation.

Gartner said energy management (both in terms of capacity and cost) can only be effective through advanced monitoring, modelling and measuring techniques and processes, but few tech execs have considered this yet.

"These metrics form the bedrock for internal cost and efficiency programmes and will become increasingly important for external use," said Kumar in a statement. "Organisations that want to publicise their carbon usage through green accounting principles will need to have their basic energy use continuously monitored."

In order to include metrics, measurement and modelling in a datacentre's green IT strategy, Gartner recommends that datacentre and IT managers:

• Raise the temperature at the server inlet point up to 24C (71 to 75F), but use sensors to monitor potential hotspots.
• Develop a dashboard of datacentre energy-efficient metrics that provides appropriate data to different levels of IT and financial management.
• Use the SPECpower benchmark to evaluate the relative energy efficiencies of the servers.
• Improve the use of the existing infrastructure through consolidation and virtualisation before building out or buying new/additional datacentre floor space.