Research claims green monitoring ignored

Data centre and IT managers are not paying attention to the process of measuring and monitoring energy use in data centres, according to a poll conducted by Gartner. Gartner said that unless users create dashboards, they will not be able to reduce energy costs and meet compliance requirements.

The Gartner webinar conducted among 130 attendees from the Infrastructure and Operations (I&O) management found that although green IT issues remain at the top of the agenda, respondents consider vendor and green procurement a low priority activity. Although 68 percent of respondents thought data centre energy management is an important green IT issue for the next 18 months, only 7 percent consider green procurement and pushing vendors to create energy efficient solutions as their top priority.

"This finding affirmed in client conversations reveals that, although the green IT and data centre energy issue has been on the agenda, many managers feel that they have to deal with other concerns," said Rakesh Kumar, vice president of Research, Gartner. "Even if more energy efficient servers or management tools were available, data centre and IT managers are interested in internal projects," he added.

Gartner said energy management can be effective through monitoring, modelling and measuring techniques. However, when asked which energy management metrics they will use in the next 18 months, 48 percent of respondents have not even considered the issue of metrics.

"These metrics form the bedrock for internal cost and efficiency programmes and will become important for external use. Organisations that want to publicise their carbon usage through green accounting principles will need to have their energy use monitored," added Kumar.

In order to include metrics, measurement and modelling in a datacenter's green IT strategy, Gartner recommends that data centre and IT managers implement recommendations such as raising the temperature of the server inlet point, using the SPECpower benchmark and developing a dashboard of data centre energy efficiency metrics.