Optimizing Iceland by Tate Cantrell

Views and Opinions on Green IT (Oct 26 2009) Construction , Power and Cooling

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   As we’ve explored in past blogs, carbon reduction legislation combined with an unflattering economy has companies all over the world reassessing their data center practices to reduce power consumption and curb electricity costs.  Our focus here in Iceland is helping companies tackle both of these tall tasks by making use of the environment for green energy sources and natural cooling.  While many companies are exploring this trend for strategically locating data centers based on nature’s benefits, others have focused their attention on making proactive changes within the infrastructure to lower emissions and power costs.

   
   

   On this infrastructure side, server virtualization is becoming an increasingly popular subject for its carbon reduction capabilities and rightfully so.  As VMware’s CTO, Scott Davis, puts it in a recent blog, “it’s about explicitly severing all dependencies between an application and the various software and hardware components necessary to perform the specific task – so that every layer is isolated and can be provisioned, managed, updated and secured independently.”  For data centers, this essentially means that multiple servers can operate on the same piece of hardware, which can result in a huge boost for power management.  Implementing an overall infrastructure strategy that would include storage and network virtualization will no only optimize workload management, but can also  reduce costs and electricity consumption for powering and cooling data centers.  If you coupled this with Iceland’s geothermal/hydro-electric power sources and natural cooling environment for the remaining hardware, you’d have an incredibly optimized data center solution that could prove to be revolutionary in terms of savings.

   
   

   A greener data center is only going to become a bigger priority as the push for carbon emissions reduction advances and companies would surely appreciate some cost-savings in the process.  Not to mention an optimized IT strategy that could possibly become an instrumental part of a company’s success.  A ground-breaking solution like this could really alter the way companies approach their data center needs. With that notion in mind, it will be interesting to see if this progressive strategy becomes a trend in itself and we see a shift towards a virtual Iceland in the near future.     

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