Data Center Efficiency Series: Refresh, Virtualize, and Consolidate

Data Center Management

Operating an efficient data center is critical as more organizations move toward cloud computing and virtualized environments. With high energy costs and pressure toward eco-friendly practices, it is critical to continually implement innovative strategies in order to optimize power consumption and overall data center efficiency.

Over the next few blog posts, we will discuss the most effective ways for data center management. The following strategies help reduce data center energy consumption without compromising availability. This will be a six-part series on strategies to improve data center efficiency:

Technology Refresh, Virtualization and Consolidation

Power Management

Cooling

Server Efficiency

Storage Efficiency

Space and Design Efficiency

Part 1: Technology Refresh, Virtualization and Consolidation

Upgrading IT hardware and applications in data centers can significantly reduce power consumption. Replacing older, inefficient servers with newer, more powerful and energy-efficient servers is a good first step in reducing your utility costs.

Implementing virtualization technology will help reduce the number of power-consuming servers required in a server refresh. Virtualization also simplifies the task of consolidation and may increase hardware utilization.

In addition, organizations should consolidate servers, storage and network hardware wherever possible. It has become more popular to adopt a blade enclosure instead of rack-mounted servers because of shared resources such as power, fans, networking, and storage. Blades enclosures require between 10% and 25% less power and cooling for the same computing capacity.