Green has been a buzz word in the IT industry for some time now, and there are many groups and companies focusing on helping IT understand their data centre energy consumption and methods by which this an be reduced.

We are now starting to see government take more interest in this as part of their policies to reduce CO2 emissions and carbon footprints. The UK government is one of the first to put in place regulation that requires companies to monitor, report and reduce their energy consumption. The Carbon Reduction Commitment requires companies to report their energy consumption and to buy allowances to offset their CO2 footprint. This scheme starts in April 2010, but takes energy consumed in 2008 as its baseline - so its too late now for a business to affect the first years reporting and they need to focus instead on how to reduce energy consumption over the coming years so as to limit the amount they need to spend on allowances.

Many large data centre operators and IT departments consume significant amounts of energy, both in the IT equipment and the facilities infrastructure to support the IT equipment. One of the biggest challenges today is that many IT managers do not see the electricity bills for their data centers - this usually goes to the facilities department and so they may have little or no idea of the energy costs of their infrastructure. Another factor to consider here is that many data centers are running older generation IT equipment, much of which was not designed with energy efficiency in mind and the facilities themselves were often not designed to optimize the air handling and cooling within the building or to minimize the costs of running this equipment.

There are a number of tools available today that can help an IT manager get a better understanding of how efficient their DC is in terms of energy usage and can help in understanding the effect of various changes on the overall energy efficiency of the data centre. One of these is the Power Utilisation Effectiveness ( PUE ) metric developed by The Green Grid which looks at the ratio of the IT load to the total facilities load within data centre. The Green Grid also publishes various white-papers and guidelines that can be used to better manage the PUE value for a data centre. There are also some good white papers produced by Intel's IT group on how to improve data centre layout and design.

It is also important to consider the actual IT equipment that is deployed within the data centre. Over recent years there have been many advances in server power management technology that when combined with the performance increases delivered by the latest generation CPUs can help IT reduce their overall energy consumption. With Intel Xeon 5500 based servers its possible to achieve significant levels of server consolidation, which when combined with the fact these servers typically consume less power than those they will replace can lead to significant reduction in power bills. In many cases it is cheaper to buy new servers and operate  than it is to continue running the existing installed base of servers. Intel has a simple tool, here, that can help IT make this assessment and determine how fast a payback they can achieve by refreshing their installed base of servers.

Using these tools and latest generation server technology can help an IT department make a significant contribution to lowering energy consumption and contributing to a businesses Carbon Reduction Commitment.