Kermit the Frog was right -- it's not easy being green. But it's easier than it used to be. Enterprise-sized companies, including IBM and The Coca-Cola Co., have taken the lead in making sure their IT operations are as "green" as possible. But what about the green data center of the future? What strategies are in play now to move the data center beyond green?

 

Analysts agree that there will be no decrease in power demands from data centers. The good news is the 15% to 30% of the yearly increase in operating costs that companies have been experiencing seems to be leveling off. Increasingly, companies will seek "more efficiency using the resources you have" said Greg Clark, global portfolio director, data center services at Computer Sciences Corp. "We won't see a decrease in power usage by data centers in the future. It will be more about balancing power, space and cooling." The granular details of data center infrastructures will become increasingly important to manage that balance, Clark noted.

 

There's no question that CIOs at large companies are already taking steps to make the data center more energy efficient. For example, companies have instituted water-cooling capabilities where possible, deployed "cold aisle" heating and cooling methodologies, and consolidated servers using virtualization. As with smaller companies, virtualization has provided a dual benefit: lower hardware costs and lower power bills.

 

To that end, enterprise companies have taken the lead in using virtualization as a consolidation tool. In a Forrester Research Inc. study released in May and authored by Frank Gillett, a survey base of 179 enterprise hardware purchasing decision makers reported they expect 45% of their x86 servers to be virtual within two years. Thirty-seven percent of a slightly larger pool of 197 listed improved power and cooling as very important factors in making the decision to virtualize.

 

St. Louis-based MasterCard Worldwide has used virtualization widely to cut hardware costs and lower energy bills. About 45% of the company's x86 servers are virtualized, as are 20% of the its Unix servers.

 

The company's main data center is huge. MasterCard occupies a 550,000-square-foot data center on 52 acres in O'Fallon, Mo., and has 1.8 petabytes of available storage. The data center is the company's largest and was built from the ground up with energy efficiency in mind, said Jim Hull, group executive, global operations for MasterCard International's global technology and operations group.

 

"When we built the data center [in 2001], we built it with sufficient power and air conditioning to accommodate significant growth," Hull said. Specifically, the data center has floors that are raised to 36 inches in the center for increased airflow. The ceiling height has been raised to accommodate server build that goes up and not out, he added. Water-cooling capability is built in for future use if it's needed and the data center uses "hot aisle/cold aisle" cooling for heat dissipation. Power and air conditioning hardware is housed outside the data center.

 

Blade servers are not a significant part of MasterCard's data center strategy for now. This mirrors the results of Forrester's virtualization survey. In that study, only 18% of 179 hardware decision makers at enterprise companies said they were highly motivated to buy more blade servers in the next two years. Thirty percent simply agreed that they would buy more blade servers during that same period. Vendor lock-in was mentioned as one of the factors for shunning blade servers. Hull concurred: "They're not standardized yet."