Page 243 -

The Greening of IT
208 How Companies Can Make a Difference for the Environment

In 2009, the group is expected to release some of its most important deliver-
ables in the form of metrics that businesses can use to measure the power
usage effectiveness of facilities infrastructure equipment. Most businesses can
already readily identify areas where infrastructure optimization can achieve
increased efficiency by simply monitoring and measuring their existing
infrastructure equipment. Additionally, the Environmental Protection
Agency (EPA) is stepping in to help create metrics as well. About 100 com-
panies have indicated they will provide raw power data and other informa-
tion to the EPA for use in developing its new benchmark. The EPA indicated
that the results of the benchmark should be available by 2010.
Until widely accepted metrics become available, businesses should make
sure the utility costs associated with their data center operations are broken
out separately from those for other corporate facilities. In addition, metering
specific equipment racks or types of equipment such as servers can provide
valuable insight into which specific consolidation, virtualization, and opti-
mization projects would yield the best ROI going forward.
Energy optimization software is discussed in Chapter 2 in the section,
“You Can’t Manage What You Can’t Measure.” This discusses energy man-
ptg
agement software such as IBM’s Active Energy Manager (AEM) and HP’s
Insight Control. Appendix A further discusses available energy monitoring
and management software tools.

5. Implement Efficient Applications and Deduplicate Data

Chapter 2 discusses the significance of software and application efficiency
for green IT. Data storage efficiency such as the use of tiered storage is also
significant, as described in Chapter 9, “Green IT Case Studies for Energy
Utilities.” Data deduplication (often called intelligent compression or single-
instance storage) is a method of reducing storage needs by eliminating
redundant data. Only one unique instance of the data is actually retained on
storage media, such as disk or tape. Redundant data are replaced with a
pointer to the unique data copy. For example, a typical e-mail system might
contain 100 instances of the same one megabyte (MB) file attachment. If the
e-mail platform is backed up or archived, all 100 instances are saved, requir-
ing 100MB storage space. With data deduplication, only one instance of the
attachment is actually stored; each subsequent instance is just referenced
back to the one saved copy. In this example, a 100MB storage demand could
be reduced to only 1MB.