Meeting Green Computing Challenges

Focus on green computing has been growing lately. Green computing refers to supporting business critical computing needs with least possible amount of power or sustainable computing. This represents a dramatic change in priority in IT industry. In the past, the sole focus was on IT equipment processing power and associated equipment spending while infrastructure that includes power, cooling and data center space was always assumed available, ready, a given and affordable. Today, the infrastructure is becoming a limiting factor that can determine how and if IT equipment can be deployed to meet business growth while processing power is becoming a given, even thought not ignored. The driving force behind this change comes from the ever growing business computing needs, fast growing burden of energy cost, growing awareness of global warming issues, and increasing sense of national energy security. On the fronts of global warming issues and energy security, various regulations and laws will soon be in place that will force the use of IT equipment that meet certain energy efficiency requirements. Equally important is the concern for ever growing cost burden for supporting growing business critical computing needs that outpace the infrastructure growth. This paper will provide a review of how IT equipment power consumption across the industry is changing the IT industry priority. It will focus on how equipment power consumption impacts the overall power usage and total cost of ownership and how the power issues may impact what customers may or may not buy and deploy to meet their business needs. It will also briefly cover the general technological trends in the IT industry of what technologies are available in the race to meet green computing requirements.