INTELLIGENT GREEN TECHNOLOGY
Driving yields from networking
and cabling inside datacentres
Low power modes of operation and common circuits for data and power inside
datacentres are generating cost savings explains Alfred Tharwat at R&M.
O
ver the last couple years, the
topic of Green IT has regularly
piqued the interest of CIOs
and IT managers across the Middle
East and North Africa region. Smarter
investments, high quality products and
high density solutions have all helped
reduce the ecological footprint of
organisations. But despite industry-wide
initiatives and high operational costs,
the demand for power is on the rise and
nowhere more than in the datacentre.
In markets where the datacentre
industry is well established, efficiency
measures are in fact being implemented.
Within the region however, much needs
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to be done if datacentre efficiency and
subsequently operational expenses are to
be reduced.
Beyond cost savings, there is an
urgent need to address datacentre power
consumption to reduce the impact of
IT on the environment. Solutions such
as building datacentres in cold areas
are unfortunately not an option in
this region. But there are still factors
which can be addressed to make power
consumption in datacentres significantly
more efficient and one of these is
network convergence.
Let us specify just what we mean
by network convergence. Years ago,
resources in a building would be grouped
and devoted to one particular function,
such as telephony, internet, security,
building infrastructure or data. Today,
however, we are seeing integrated pools
of computers, storage and networking
resources increasingly being shared
across multiple applications. This is
enabled by automatically allocating
resources to specific processes, based on
precisely defined policies.
Converged infrastructure provides
enormous efficiency increases,
from both technical and business
perspectives. It helps reduce overall
power consumption, improves cooling
Issue 02
INTELLIGENT TECH CHANNELS