The Storage Economist

I am heading to Park City, Utah for a week to escape the heat in Texas, and wanted to quickly conclude some thoughts on environmental costs and the impact of the right server and storage architecture.

This Oracle article is a little dated, but is a good summary of the importance of good, clean power when more emphasis is placed on virtualized IT resources. I believe most of the virtualization references are aimed at servers and applications, but the arguments for storage virtualization are also valid. Inside the report are some good (but outdated) Gartner quotes around power costs and impact to the data center over the next few years.

While working in Asia last month, the problems and rise of power in many countries have most IT architects looking at new designs for sustainability. There are also some new government programs to incent large corporate investments in energy efficiencies. Listed below are samples of some of these programs:

www.epa.gov/greenpower/pubs/incentives.htm

www.lowcarbonsg.com/2009/05/10/singapore-guide-to-government-funding-and-incentives-for-the-environment/

http://aseanenergy.org/

http://energy.gov/savings

Lastly, around 3-5 years ago I heard some buzz about the new CEO, the Chief Environmental Officer. This position has been discussed in several articles in trade press, and even at some large conferences, but I have not yet seen this role develop within the companies that I visit and work with. If you know of some examples, or if your own company has a similar position, please leave me some feedback. I am interested to see how this role is impacting the data center and current IT decisions.