Data Centers Lack Tools, Commitment to be Green

New York — A survey by the Aperture Research Institute (ARI) of more than 100 data center professionals has shown that organizations are unable or unwilling to meet the expectations set by their adoption of green initiatives for the data center. This follows an earlier ARI report, which discovered that 70% of organizations are adopting green initiatives, although 19% of those had omitted the data center from that program.
 
In the ARI study, 74% of those surveyed refused to activate power-saving features on devices if it would require a drop in performance. While 37% are concerned that the power/performance ratio doesn’t add up, 15% worry that they have no way to track whether the power-saving setting is on or off. Nearly half (48%) of those people surveyed blame the business for not using power-saving features, saying that users wouldn’t tolerate a drop in performance in the interests of saving power.

When it comes to procurement, energy efficiency and ease of disposal are the lowest priorities, rated as less significant than brand and price. Thirty-seven percent of data centers have no plans to measure energy efficiency, and 76% do not charge the business for the power used by the IT it commissions. One reason for that is a lack of infrastructure for measuring power consumption.
 
The survey also found that decommissioning processes are not strictly followed, and “ghost servers” haunt the data centers of 19% of organizations. Ghost servers are those servers that the business no longer needs, but which have not been switched off and, as a result, needlessly consume electricity, space and other limited resources.
 
For more information, visit www.aperture.com.

Source: DM Review