IDC has lots to say about greening the data center

Don't forget to register and use GROVE1595 for your code to attend the TUI Symposium at a discount. See my blog of February 23, 2008 for full explanation and the link.

I had the opportunity to hear Matthew Eastwood and Michelle Bailey of IDc speak at their Enterprise Data center Forum event in San Francisco on April 7th. IDC, you may know, is generally credited with maintaining the best industry-installed base and projections numbers among the analysts, and I like to hear their insights obtained from "following the numbers".  They did not disappoint.

To begin with, here is Matthew Eastwood’s list of attributes required when designing products to be economically, socially and ecologically sustainable. He gave examples from IT products

1. Durable (longer service life)
2. Energy efficient
3. Designed for reuse and/or recycling
4. Manufactured with local or renewable resources

He had a 5th attribute but I could not understand it in context and I forgot to ask him what it meant, so I will not include it here. Anyway, this is the measure by which we should judge appliances in the data center to be "green". 

Having said that, Eastman moved on to data centers.
Today, there are 365,000 full racks of servers representing US$15B in data center assets. And it takes $30 billion to cool those racks! Thirty million servers sit in those racks today, and that will grow to 45 million servers by 2011. IDC's research indicates that 90% of those racks are filled with X86 servers, and on average, where they are not virtualized, they are 90% underutilized. The good news is that 10% are virtualized, and within an organization that has started a virtualization initiative, 22% are virtualized.

Virtualization is ubiquitous in 100,000-plus employee companies up from 72% of all installed servers to 90% from 2006 – 07.  In medium companies  with 500 - 1000 employees, virtualized servers went from 38% – 71%.

Bailey added more numbers:  Today America has 7000 enterprise class data centers  of which 50% or more are In metropolitan/suburban areas.  They have 50,000 sq ft on average and support more than 1/3 of all systems within their respective companies.  Their average age is 12 years (built in 1996) and building updated facilities will cost an average of $25 – $50 million, with costs of construction exceeding $1000 per sq foot.  Today's "norm is designing with 125kws per sq foot.

Bailey provided this "solution" investment prioritization indicating how enterprises are dividing up their budgets for data center retrofits between today and when those new data centers can be occupied:

1. Room level changes: 30% hot cold aisles, reduced cabling, plenum clean up
2. System level changes: 29% low voltage chips, memory and power supplies
3. Rack level changes 24% blanking panels, in-row cooling, network sensors
4. Consulting services 17% design services & utility rebates, and thermal assessments

As a team, their conclusions were quite clear: Are we green yet? No, not close.  Have a Green Day!

Note: I am writing these notes from memory, not from the slides, so I may have blended the separate presentations by Eastman and Bailey, but I feel pretty sure that the notes are accurate...