Successful chief information officers (CIOs) recognize the potential for information technology (IT) to serve as a catalyst for business innovation. Yet essential IT infrastructure depends completely on its adjunct support structure – facilities. Without power, heat and light; without secure, conditioned real estate; without skilled personnel and prudent purchasing decisions, the data center is powerless to advance the business.
By 2009, energy costs will be the second highest cost item for data centers after labor, according to 2007 Gartner research. Most organizations do not measure or track the energy used in data centers in mixed-use facilities, much less include the cost of energy or its impact on the environment in their economic evaluation. How can this be after years of focusing on green initiatives, rising energy costs, conferences and media attention?
IT and facilities departments must communicate to effectively run the modern-day data center and achieve green data center initiatives. This article addresses the organizational structure and behaviors that may be preventing green data centers from becoming the norm. Some of the factors discussed includes executive sponsorship, organizational behavior and establishing common metrics for IT and facilities to measure progress on business objectives and corporate sustainability initiatives.
Data
Center Business Issues
Data centers, drawing 10 times the power of a commercial building, are being targeted for energy conservation. The rising costs of energy, along with the demand for additional power and cooling to run the data centers, may be limiting some organizations’ financial abilities for growth.
Technology is not the limiting factor in metering and monitoring IT and facilities equipment in data centers. Due to an increase in bandwidth and continued improvements to wireless technologies, there has been a significant decrease in the cost of communications.
Many data centers have disparate systems in place to meter and monitor IT storage, network and computer assets, the facilities’ power distribution, power quality, battery condition and cooling systems. These monitoring systems are typically not linked into an enterprise-wide monitoring system, meaning that an issue in one area of the data center may not be evident to other key personnel who should be monitoring the situation.
Even if these disparate monitoring systems are in place, the system may not be optimized if the IT, facilities and supply chain groups do not share strategies and metrics. Effective strategies cross organizational barriers and can deliver measurable results to the business.
External Influences
Historically, the primary metric used by data center personnel was availability. While availability is still the primary metric used to measure progress on business objectives, organizations are now also monitoring the efficiency of the data center to support corporate sustainability initiatives. The Green Grid, a non-profit consortium, is developing energy efficiency and productivity metrics for data centers that can be used by both IT and facilities. Key metrics include Data Center Infrastructure Efficiency (DCiE) and its inverse, Power Utilization Effectiveness (PUE). These metrics enable IT and facility operators to measure efficiency or the overhead for power and cooling in real-time.
DCiE % = Total Power used by IT / Total Power In * 100%
PUE = 1 / DCiE = Total Power In / Total Power used by IT
A survey conducted by The Uptime Institute in 2007 indicated that many data centers have a PUE of 3.0 or more. An ideal PUE is 1.6 or less, which is obtainable with currently available technologies and systems. Most organizations are unaware of their data center’s efficiency since historically, efficiency was not important.
The Green Grid is also working with organizations like the U.S. Green Building Council’s LEED program (Leadership in Environmental Energy and Design) to develop additional metrics, tools and processes for organizations to compare their efficiencies against data centers supporting similar functions.
Internal Influences
IT enables business processes, collaboration and new business models and as a result, may have a C-level seat on the leadership team. Facilities, while they also play an important role in delivering results, typically do not.
Figure 2 illustrates how most business organize their IT and facilities with separate groups.
Working within the typical organizational structure, the CIO may not have direct control over his or her data center’s design or costs. This is especially true if organizations utilize legacy supply chain metrics which often focus on lowest initial costs rather than total cost of ownership, or work with third-party contractors.
To ensure optimized IT and facilities initiatives that also support sustainability initiatives, the CEO and chief financial officer (CFO) should become engaged. They can ensure energy efficiency is tracked and that goals and incentives for IT and facilities optimize energy consumption while meeting the business goals of the organization, with rewards and risks fairly allocated.
In complex systems such as data centers, actions by one group may not be readily apparent until the moment of execution, especially when there are time delays between events. For example, the impact of adding additional IT loads on specific circuits may not result in a circuit breaker tripping until the normal utility is lost and the standby generator(s) are operating. In this case, it may not be the circuit breaker providing power to an individual server, but rather a main circuit breaker upstream which will have much more profound impacts on the data center and the business. If IT and facilities are not in complete synchronization on these types of events, disastrous results may occur.
As organizations adopt blade servers and virtualization, they can reduce the number of servers and racks and total energy consumption by an order of magnitude while increasing their server utilization from an average 6 percent to 60 percent. This poses new challenges for facilities managers as the power density in these racks increase from an average 5 KW/rack to 10, 15, 25 or more KW/rack. These increased power densities require facilities managers to introduce new cooling technologies, meaning additional capital is required to cover the operating expenses and risks to the data center.
In organizations with an optimized organizational structure, each group would understand the common business goals of the organization, their peers and their own goals and collaborate on a strategic plan to achieve them.
Recommendations for the Data Center
- Executive Sponsorship - Energy efficiency needs to be driven from the CEO down. An optimized organizational structure would have the proper metrics and incentives in place to ensure that risks and rewards are fairly distributed throughout the organization including IT, facilities and supply chain.
- Organizational Structure – To ensure that IT and facilities are coordinated, a senior facilities executive should report to the CIO. This helps ensure that the critical power and cooling issues are addressed in strategic planning along with the IT kit.
- Metrics - Organizations should evaluate their data centers and incorporate metrics currently being developed by the industry to measure progress on their efficiency goals and their global corporate sustainability goals.
- Processes - End users should develop processes to evaluate their data centers using total cost of ownership (TCO) to ensure they obtain the lowest energy consumption and carbon footprint while meeting business objectives. They should challenge their IT and facility vendors and engineering firms to provide energy metrics with their proposals, including escalating energy costs.
- Technology - Virtualization technology enables IT and facilities to proactively manage their systems with a holistic view as shown in the following illustration.
Enterprise-wide software tools enable organizations to address business service management issues while optimizing operational support infrastructure. With this “single-pane of glass,” CIOs and personnel are able to proactively understand the dynamic issues they face to ensure business success.
This integrated approach to managing IT and facilities will also assist in communicating corporate sustainability initiatives and help each individual visualize how they can participate in reducing the organization’s carbon footprint.
In summary, to be competitive in a global market, organizations that can work collaboratively may be better situated to operate more efficiently. While there are technical issues in integrating complex systems, the human and organizational behavior issues must not be overlooked.
About the author:
Kenneth Uhlman is the Director of Data Center Business Development for Eaton Corporation in
