Data centre operators must adopt the mindset of mobile phone software developers or risk the wrath of regulators for wasting energy.
That was the message from non-profit group The Green Grid following a survey of 150 IT decision makers that found nearly half of data centres have no energy efficiency objectives in place.
The survey, published at the recent DCD Europe conference, found less than a third of operators can entirely quantify their data centre’s environmental impact.
Roel Castelein, EMEA Marketing Chair for The Green Grid, said the results were damning, but unsurprising.
“If you want to improve something, you have to have a measurement instrument in place. So either there is a breakdown in communications between the guys that are running the data centre and the board. Or they are just paying it lip service, and in the end nothing really happens.”
Castelein said he was unaware of any system capable of measuring the entire chain from facility to app, but called for collaboration to solve the puzzle.
In the meantime, he advised data centre operators to emulate mobile phone software developers to minimise footprints.
“Whereas standard software developers don’t care about the energy efficiency of the code that they write, mobile developers have resource constraints from the start,” Castelein told Mission Critical Power. “Every app they write must take into account battery life, energy consumption, bandwidth. If I were running a large, resource-intensive data centre business, I would try to find mobile phone developers and just start talking with them.”
Click here to see if you qualify for a free subscription to the print magazine, or to renew.
Follow us @mcriticalpower. For regular updates, sign up for the free newsletter.
