According to Barb Goldworm, as the cost of energy rises "green" operations are becoming more significant to the data center community as they hold the opportunity for substantial cost savings.



Barb discusses her graph: "It now costs more just for the energy to power the servers than it does for the servers themselves. And so if you look at the kind of dollars we are talking about, I have an example here of a 1000 square foot datacenter holding 3010 kilowatts racks, power required for that infrastructure is 300 kilowatts, therefore the power required to cool it also 300 kilowatts. What that brings you is an annual cost for cooling of $240,000. If we can reduce that by 50%, that’s $120,000 per year to the bottom line that gets people’s attention. The challenge of course is that that money tends to come out of the facilities budget. And so one of the challenges is how do you get your facilities folks working with your IT folks to get those savings. The way that you do that is through a variety of different opportunities."



And based on projected energy usage through 2011, she adds, "significant savings that can come through power management and efficiency as well as virtualization can address those challenges that we talked about on the energy side."

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