IT departments need to build a business case for greater data centre efficiency measurement if they are looking at bringing escalating costs under control, according to Ovum.
Most organisations do not adequately measure resource use in their data centres or do not measure resource use at all. As a result, organizations are unable to effectively tackle rising costs.
IT decision-makers must build a business case and drive the message home to senior management to gain support for investment in a multi-faceted efficiency measurement strategy.
Rhonda Ascierto, Ovum senior analyst, said: Despite the fact that data centres are inefficient money pits, most organisations are not measuring inefficiencies or resource use.”
Disparate IT systems and a lack of information sharing among different site teams have fuelled the attitude that data efficiency measurement is too difficult and expensive to implement. This means a massive opportunity is being missed to reduce the vast resources that data centres swallow up,” Ascierto added.
Leveraging the Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) metric alone is not an adequate measurement strategy and will not lead to significant cost savings and resource efficiencies. Instead, organisations should be implementing PUE in addition to several new metrics released by The Green Grid, the industry-led not-for-profit organisation that created PUE. These include Water Usage Effectiveness (WUE), Carbon Usage Effectiveness (CUE) and several data productivity proxies, as well as the new Data Centre Maturity Model, a blueprint for efficiency and sustainability measurement for data centers.
PUE only measures the efficiency of a facility’s infrastructure, such as air conditioning and lighting. Judging a data centre on PUE alone is akin to judging a company’s performance solely on earnings per share. The ways in which data centres consume resources are complex and multi-dimensional, and multiple metrics are needed to properly gauge their efficiency.
Despite recessionary trends, the data center infrastructure market grew to $13.1 billion in 2010, according to Synergy Research Group.
By TelecomLead.com Team
