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?Green storage?: strategies for enhancing energy efficiency.

Article Excerpt
Energy costs in the data center are rising at a dizzying rate. They already account for the second largest line item associated with datacenter operations and are predicted to rise to 50% of the overall IT budget in just a few years.

Steadily rising energy costs have been the norm for some time now, with customers paying more for power every year. Today, the average cost of utilities for a 100,000-square-foot data center is running at a staggering $5.9 million annually, and it?s getting worse. Even if an enterprise devotes this level of spend to energy every year, it runs the risk of running out of power eventually, especially if it?s powered via an older utility infrastructure: Gartner reports that by 2008, 50% of IT managers will not have enough power to run their data centers. Compounding this problem, data centers waste energy on inefficient server and storage infrastructures, with wastage calculations running as high as 60% in many environments. Yet in spite of these present and future challenges, the situation is not entirely bleak.

IT has already made inroads into controlling energy costs associated with servers. With ten million--and counting--servers installed in the U.S. alone, corralling runaway server costs has already resulted in significant energy savings. IT managers have focused their early energy efficiency efforts on consolidating and virtualizing servers, moving away from...

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