The Greening Of The Data Center — A Four-Part Strategy To Achieve The Energy-Efficient Infrastructure

As industry analysts and consultants, the Taneja Group has a single driving mission: to deliver hype-free, accurate, and responsible information about important issues impacting the server and storage industry.

This is why we have turned our attention to the green data center, which we believe badly needs insight and clarity in the midst of marketing smokescreens and competing claims. This Technology in Depth represents Taneja Group s take on this important issue. We present the background of the energy crisis, explore important data center trends, and tell you how we believe the industry should respond to a real problem and a real opportunity.

Many vendors have already jumped on the green bandwagon and are busily marketing themselves and their products as green. As the push to the green data center is relatively new, the vast majority of these vendors are highlighting existing power-conserving products and practices. There is nothing wrong with this per se, and we applaud vendors who already have power-efficient products in place. However, this approach alone is a mere finger in the dyke of unrestrained data growth and data center energy costs that are skyrocketing towards the stratosphere.

Powerful business applications, Internet-fueled data growth, compliance pressures, governance, litigation self-defense: multiple pressures are spurring corporations to produce and store more data than ever before. Server, storage and networking vendors have responded by producing ever more powerful equipment to boost performance, speed and availability.