IBM Tivoli User Community

EXECUTIVE CORNER

By Jim Fletcher
Distinguished Engineer and Chief Architect
IBM Tivoli Green Data Center

Thinking greener in today’s IT environment

Until recently, no one in IT gave much thought to the quantity of electricity needed to power their initiatives – nor the costs involved.

But as energy becomes more expensive, and IT departments struggle to cut unnecessary waste and find money for new technology initiatives, greening the data center is a no-brainer. That’s especially true at a time when power and cooling expenses can make up 44 percent of a data center’s total cost of ownership, according to Morgan Stanley.

Software in the green data center

At the heart of the green data center you’ll find software that bridges the divide between IT and a company’s facilities department, which procures power and cooling, to provide end-to-end awareness of energy use across all IT and supporting facilities systems.

A quick look at how it works: Data is gathered with metering devices to measure the electricity tapped by data center components – as well as other relevant information, such as temperature, air flow and humidity levels.

The software collects the data provided by the sensors, or by users, and then takes actions, such as automatically reducing power consumption of servers when possible to increase overall energy efficiency. It can also reveal the relationships between IT and facility components, including power supplies and cooling units, and provide that information at a business level.

This information can help IT departments determine how a failure or planned component outage can affect the business, and prioritize problem resolution accordingly. Users might also gain the insight to shift applications to less power-hungry servers.

IBM’s approach

IBM is pioneering software that collects metrics from a wide range of IT and facilities systems to achieve all this, and more. Aggregating this broad set of data lets users visualize an end-to-end view of their energy consumption – and make smarter decisions.

At the center of the green data center, Tivoli Monitoring for Energy Management integrates with other Tivoli software and third-party facilities and building automation systems. When used with Tivoli Business Systems Manager, it can reveal impact at a business service level – for example, if a server that powers a key accounting application is overheating, you can shift the application to another server to ensure the more important service stays up and available. By also including aspects of IBM Tivoli Monitoring and Tivoli OMEGAMON solutions for the IBM System z platform, you can control power use based on broader awareness of IT system usage.

In addition, the IBM energy management software integrates with IBM Tivoli Usage and Accounting Manager to allocate energy-related costs to departments that use the hardware and applications. Solutions such as Tivoli Provisioning Manager and Tivoli Workload Scheduler complement the energy management solutions with energy-aware provisioning, and task and workload scheduling.

Assess your data center to begin saving immediately

In addition, you can do plenty right now to lower your electricity bills – in some cases easily by more than 20 percent, based on experiences with our customers.

Start by conducting a thorough visual inspection of your data center. Do missing floor tiles potentially cause a wasted flow of chilled air? What about servers that remain active long after applications are inactive? Identifying and shutting down this hardware can provide instant savings.

Also determine whether you’re getting the most from virtualization to reduce floor space and cooling. Consolidating certain distributed workloads and applications to Linux on the mainframe can maximize your hardware, as can tapping more powerful servers and virtualized environments to gain higher utilization rates.

And don’t forget temperature control. By adopting a hot and cold aisle approach – a data center design method that separates warm air from chilled air – you can potentially save significantly on energy.

Check out Pulse 2009

And please join us at Pulse 2009, the industry’s premier service management event, Feb. 8 – 12, in Las Vegas, Nevada. This IBM conference focuses on a range of Tivoli solutions and will highlight strategies to take advantage of energy management. Look for presentations that address green trends in facilities management and IT operations, and corporate green initiatives for enterprise asset management.

Over time, companies will face increasing pressure to more effectively manage energy use. It’s already started happening throughout the world. Thinking greener now can help you move down that path, not only without impacting IT services, but while potentially freeing up hundreds of thousands of dollars for new IT initiatives.