On April 22nd, we recognized the 47th official Earth Day; the original was held in 1970, when it was founded by Gaylord Nelson as an environmental teach-in. For those of us in the IT industry, it’s an opportunity to evangelize the “green data center” and extol the virtues of consolidation, virtualization, reducing carbon footprints and lowering the consumption of power and cooling. And we should be having these conversations – not just in April, but all year round. As temporary residents of planet Earth, we have a responsibility to tread lightly and preserve what we have for generations to come. But the reality of green IT is that there are multiple shades of green – where environmental stewardship intersects with fiscal prudence. As IT budgets get leaner and leaner, decisions skew in favor of the green of money. But the reality is, with the right approach, green IT responsibility can equate to financial responsibility.
The green data center message is not new: upgrading to the latest servers and storage is more energy efficient. Migrating physical servers over to virtual machines and consolidating them onto fewer physical servers means lowering monthly power and cooling costs in the data center. There are financial and environmental benefits to this story. But much of this story is predicated on the traditional box buying method of procuring IT, where organizations make capital investments upfront, anticipating the capacity they will need for a given period, maxing out their storage and purchasing more. In this scenario, data storage is installed in the data center, using space and power, requiring cooling but not providing value until it is used.
Cloud and XaaS have fundamentally changed how organizations procure IT with the utility-based consumption model. With a capacity on-demand, pay-as-you-go structure, server and storage are maximized through virtualization – lowering costs, footprint and energy consumption of the data center. The Federal Government is furthering this evolution with the 2016 Data Center Optimization Initiative (DCOI), established by OMB, which seeks to consolidate data centers, reduce the cost of hardware, automate infrastructure management and shift IT investments to more efficient platforms like cloud and shared services. Clearly this is done as a means to reduce costs, but the reality is, the environmental impacts go hand in hand.
To reiterate, this story is not new, but it continuously needs to be told, because more can be done. Large cloud providers like Microsoft are using renewable energy sources to modernize their data centers, power their cloud environment responsibly and create a sustainable economic and environmental model. We are seeing the results of these types of initiatives. According to a recent CIO Dive article, “Coming Soon to a Data Center Near You: Energy Efficiency,” the rate of energy consumption has dropped dramatically, increasing only 4% from 2010-2014, compared to a 90% increase from 2000-2005.
As a leader in Storage-as-a-Service, ViON has been helping organizations maximize their data center efficiency for over 15 years. And, as a Microsoft Azure partner for our Hybrid and Public Cloud offer, we are pleased to be able to bring the benefits of their cloud environment to our customers.