Easy and Hard Path to Green - by Doug Mohney

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   Government entities are finding that there's no simple answers when it comes to going green, reports Federal Computer Week – welcome to the club, guys!   The article, "How green is your data?," points out that organizations are going for easy wins in server hardware, but need to look at data and storage as another opportunity to right size servers.

    The top three energy saving measures among feds are moving to LCD monitors, buy Energy Star-compliant gear and pursue server virtualization, says a CDW Government report on energy-efficient IT.  On the server side, there's plenty of data from vendors talking up their newer, energy-efficient products, but little information on how to save data-related energy costs and the return on investment – not to mention that fewer servers runs counter to the comp plans of hardware vendors.

    Agencies are described "on their own" since there are few systemic approaches to green computing, leaving them to work in data management/conservation practices along with green buildings, regulatory issues, and procurement practices.  Some organizations are reporting good results when they focus on data as a part of a broader energy conservation effort.

    A more eco-friendly approach to electronically stored data includes identifying redundant and poor-quality data, assessing the cost of managing it and developing a strategy for getting rid of redundant and poor-quality data.  Creating a single master or "gold" copy of data that multiple departments use can save money, rather than letting each department create and maintain its own.  Access and exchange of data should be conducted through reusable data services; this can save software license and programming time, as well as cut down on the number of servers involved.

   
   

   Oregon got into green data center management four years ago when it consolidated 11 data centers down into one.  Server virtualization helped reduce both energy and carbon and a new storage strategy also added to the reductions.  The data center chose a mix of disk storage and virtual tape libraries, allowing state agencies and departments to choose the storage approach that is most cost-effective and uses the least amount of energy for their needs – and put a rate structure on top of it to provide incentives for users to "do the right thing."  In the future, the center will start on a process of deduplication to get rid of redundant data to shrink both online storage and backup requirements.  Accenture estimates that deduplication can shrink the physical space required for datasets and files between 30 to 90 percent – that's a lot of tapes and disks.

   
   

   
   

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