The Way Out
Investing in blade servers is not the appropriate solution because in the entire data center maybe only certain racks require that kind of cooling. Does that mean one does away with the existing data center? The answer is obviously no and as Nair puts it, “There is specific type of cooling in data center that is known as the precion cooling and it revolves around the concept of comfort cooling.”

Emerson realized this problem and one of the company's divisions, called Liebert in US located those extreme density racks in a data center which require 15-20kilo watt and designed a cooling solution bearing the same in mind. This solution is better known as XDV.

It works on the principle of air flow management and caters to the need of every rack pertaining to it's requirement and hence does not cool the entire data center. The initial cost of XD maybe high but the payback time will witness the customer lower their power bills immensely and that too within a year. Emerson has deployed XD with customers like Bharti that created country's largest data center with 50,000 sq feet area and Dell that has put up a manufacturing facility in Chennai, with XD.

Other Vendors Are On It Too
IBM for one has made large investments in their bid to make mother earth green. The company has made investment into multiple areas. One of the areas is research, where the company has ensured that they design better products that consume less energy.

The company has recently launched a new server called the power 6-570. This delivers approx 60% more performance at the same power it used to take on with the earlier products like the P5plus. In addition to this they invest money into creating teams, who can advice customer how to save the power. This team ensures that they visit the customers and audit their data centers and then advice them on how to save energy.

“The energy audit is part of our offering where we give customers advice, on ways in which he can reduce power. It can be as simple as moving the AC around a bit.” added Satyanathan.

He further added that today data center cools down everything to a certain temperature. But a concept of cool bays and hot bays exists within a data center. Thus, by merely rearranging things and by rearranging air conditioning one can take certain amount of efficiency from their existing infrastructure and need not invest in something new.”

By using Cisco's Network Architecture customers can extend carbon dioxide frugality measures beyond normal expectations. Cisco deploys an Environmental Management System (EMS) to comply with environmental regulations and continuously improve environmental performance. Cisco Energy Efficient Data Center (EEDC) solutions and best practices help a customer lower their costs tremendously.

However, it's not only a data center where you need to make investments. As Jayesh Kotak, VP-Product Management, D-Link elucidated,” It's a chain, It's about being both cost and environmentally conscious which is driving a whole lot of enterprises in this arena. So far everything in Green IT was all about servers, data center and other components. But from the switching perspective, no one was really thinking about being environmentally concerned.”

For example, if you buy 20-24 switch ports, typically you will connect it to a certain number of PCs or devices. Many a times, 4-5 ports are never used or better still they are used after long gaps. But the fact is that these 4-5 ports maybe consuming energy to a considerable extent despite not being in use. Again, Ethernet, as a standard is designed for supplying power for over 100 meters.

But typically not all PCs are at a distance of 100meters. In most of offices one will find that the distance from the switch to PC may be 20 meters or so. Therefore, adopting switches that can reduce the supply of power depending upon the distance will again be cost effective.

D-Link was one of the first companies to realize this following which they contributed to Green IT in the networking technology space. This technology is popularly known as Green Ethernet. The company has recently launched energy efficient switches that supply power only when the device is actually being used and reduces the supply of power depending upon the distance of the computer. In addition the components that goes into the designing of the switches are ROHS compliant (Reduction of Hazardous Substances) and hence safe to dispose and recyclable.

Intel, AMD Join In Too
Intel, the semiconductor company, makes sure that along with increased performance the processors and chips coming out of their factory consume less power and are energy efficient. So, for example, if a CPU two years back used to consume 70-80 watts of power. The new chips from Intel, ensures that it now consumes 30watts of power on the desktop side. In the notebook side there are chips that consume only 3-4 watts of power.

“If 100 millions of chips start using 50-60% less power the power consumption level comes down immensely.” stated Sandeep of Intel.

Again, according to sources, 90 out of 100 times, the processor in the desktop machine is limited to be used for word excel or internet browsing only. One really does not need a high end CPU or a high end machine to run word document and a basic machine can serve the purpose.

AMD woke up to the reality and being a company that primarily manufactures semiconductors for IT, complies with ROHS standards. The company for the first time has introduced several techniques, specifications and features that can conserve power when the system is not in use or is being partially used. Thus, Power Now feature for servers and cool and quite feature for desktops have been designed by AMD to give companies better performance at lower cost.

Thus, both the features scale the power levels of the processor to the amount of utilization. To simplify, the processor works on the logic of demand based power utilization and every time you use the machine less, it saves a lot of energy.

This aside the company is also furthering an initiative called Green Grid2004. (Greengrid.org). It has partnered with whole lot of industry dealers like Dell, Intel etc and through this website they impart a lot of information on the best practices for data centers. These best practices include setting up, running, managing and getting the best operational efficiency for the data centers.

In 2007, the company also launched next generation product called the Cool Core. This product, takes the energy efficiency to the next level in terms of granularity.

A close look at the processor design, suggests that it has a number of modules in it. Most of the applications don't make use of the entire module. For example, if you are using your exchange server you don't need your floating point module to run. Therefore, if the application is not using certain module it switches that particular module off and this way the device becomes more energy efficient and gives enhanced performance.

Another example is that of the mainframe. One can consolidate servers to mainframes and make effective usage of the space. For example, 3600 servers can be converged into 36 mainframes by consolidating and by replacing those 3600 servers and consolidating the load onto 36 mainframes; you stand to save power and space on a large scale.

Western Digital has recently launched its environmentally friendly, energy-conscious Green Power™ family of WD® enterprise hard drive products. WD RE2-GP hard drives are designed with power savings as the primary attribute and they offer massive capacity with significant power savings and lower total cost of ownership compared to other competitive enterprise-class drives.

AOC, a company that manufactures and sells monitors-has launched 15inch wide TFT monitor that saves power immensely. This monitor requires only 15watt power whereas the minimum requirement is that of 30 watts. This product does not compromise on quality and yet is energy efficient.

Sun Microsystems again has Eco Ready Kit that consists of three solutions that help customers improve performance and reduce energy. So while, Eco Assessment Kit provides a comprehensive view of customers' datacenter and infrastructure requirements with suggestions for energy efficiency improvements, the Eco Optimization Kit offers complete solution to help customers optimize and refresh their datacenter while properly recycling old equipment to reduce e-waste. Also Eco Virtualization Kit offers solution that helps overcome power and space limitations with measurable reductions in power and cooling requirements and systems footprint, along with improvements in system utilization, compute capacity and security.

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