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Server Technology's Thoughts on Uptime Institute Data Center Industry Report 2012
By Rachel Ramsey TMCnet Web Editor
The Uptime Institute, a provider of education, publications, consulting, certifications, conferences and seminars, independent research and thought leadership for the enterprise data center industry and professionals, conducted its second annual data center industry survey, collecting data on Digital Infrastructure deployment trends, procurement plans, measurement and standards practices and other topics that impact the mission-critical data center industry. The paper primarily focuses on the 1,100 owners and operators from around the world.
The survey found that even in the years that followed the 2008 financial industry meltdown, data center construction didn’t dramatically slow; 80 percent of respondents have built a new data center or upgraded an existing facility within the past five years.
Uptime anticipates that organizations will continue to utilize IT, rather than purely facilities measures, to provide the efficiency and lifecycle extension of data centers as critical corporate infrastructure. There was a significant shift between 2011 and 2012, where 10 percent fewer respondents planned to build a new data center than last year, and 10 percent more said they planned to push workloads to the cloud.
Well over half of the respondents report that savings energy is a major priority for their organizations. And yet most organizations do not have financial incentives optimized to affect real change. On average, only 20 percent of organizations’ IT departments pay the data center power bill.
A recent blog post by Server Technology explored two pieces of data that were surprising when taken together. One question was, "What power-saving strategies have you deployed or plan to deploy in the next 12 months?" In response, 75 percent of large companies and 42 percent of small companies responded that they have raised or will raise server air inlet temperatures. The second question was, "Where do you control the temperature of your computing environment?" In response, a mere 16 percent use temperatures at the server inlets.
Many intelligent cabinet PDUs have built-in capacity to measure temperature within the cabinet. Raising the server inlet temperature is being done due to various literatures touting the reductions in cooling power requirement with modest increases in temperature.
“The part of most concern to me is that either there are many organizations that aren't using intelligent cabinet PDUs to understand the IT gear power consumption increases that occur with temperature increases, or they are not properly monitoring and managing the temperature control parameters when they are sitting there available for that purpose,” said Robert Faulkner, sales engineer at Server Technology (News - Alert). “To be fair, many organizations are still looking for that proper DCIM solution to help with that control. The same Uptime survey indicates that 83 percent of respondents have real-time monitoring of environmental conditions, but only 28 percent have real-time cooling optimization.”
Server Technology offers the Sentry Power Manager (SPM), which allows an organization to monitor the temperature and humidity measurements provided by its intelligent cabinet PDUs (CDUs) in real-time. Though the system does not have the capability to control the mechanical cooling system, data output through its Application Program Interface (API), which has the capability of communicating data center information to existing management operations systems, allows various DCIM suppliers or savvy organizations to use that server inlet temperature data to provide live feedback.
SPM is the most affordable and accurate system available to measure, monitor and trend data center power. Server Technology is now offering SPM for over 50 percent off. SPM can be either virtual or appliance and middleware for DCIM integration or stand-alone power monitoring.
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Edited by Brooke Neuman
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