The Right Ground Bars and Efficiency Components such as Blade Servers on Productivity
Over the last decade there has been an increasing emphasis placed on the amount of energy consumed by IT data centers. Experts have estimated that in the Unites States alone over 450 million dollars is spent on powering data facilities every year. This has resulted in a large amount criticism from environmental groups regarding the carbon emissions caused by producing this amount of energy, with numerous factions labeling the current increasing number of data centers as environmentally unsustainable. Ground bars
Everything Matters in Efficiency, Including the Ground Bars
The rising cost of energy, coupled with the increasing emphasis on environmentally sustainable business, has consequently forced data centers to rethink their operations and attempt to enforce measures to increase center energy efficiency including rebuilds or refits of everything including ground bars. Some of the methods contemporarily implemented are:
Power usage monitoring
System virtualization
The application of power management software
The utilization of more advanced cooling technologies
The right-sizing of facilities, and consequent removal of non-critical components
The utilization of ‘green’ energy efficient IT components
This paper will however, focus primarily upon the growing tendency of data centers to utilize cutting edge ‘green’ energy efficient equipment within their centers, and the effect that this has on center productivity.
The Effect of ‘Green’ IT Components on Data Center Productivity
‘Green IT’ is the newest buzz-phrase within the IT industry, and as such component manufacturing companies such as Dell, Hewlett Packard and IBM are jumping on the bandwagon with new lines of ‘green servers’ as well as other ‘energy star rated components’. There has however, been numerous disparaging reports regarding the effect that these devices may have on productivity.
Blade servers are one ‘green’ device which has been widely adopted by data centers throughout the IT world. Many companies find these servers to be much better than previous server setups owing to the fact that they generally require less space, maintenance and energy than traditional servers.
The energy efficiency of blade servers basically stems from the fact that these servers are ‘no frills’, meaning that components such as graphic cards and keyboards are removed to reduce the overall amount of power needed during normal operations. Blade servers also require far less cabling than regular server setups due to the fact that these servers are generally consolidated, and can consequently be connected to a network much more simply.
The issue with ‘green’ components such as blade servers however, is the fact that large scale operations requiring high read-write ratios can be significantly slowed due to bottlenecks in bus speeds, disk access and networks. This can potentially reduce the overall productivity of a data center when compared to what can be achieved via conventional server setups. This is generally undesirable for centers as they need to be able to supply a consistent level of service to their consumers.
It can be noted that energy efficient components such as ground bars and blade servers can make a significant difference to the amount of energy consumed by data centers. It is however obvious, that such technology is not suitable for all applications, with some data centers facing issues such as bottlenecks. It is assumed that as technology advances these issues will be addressed, however until this occurs, centers need to weigh up their options before spending large amounts of money on such components. Ground Bars
