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Aperture Research Institute Finds Many Efficiency Initiatives Overlooking Opportunities to Reduce Costs
(M2 PressWIRE Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) Stamford, CT -- While green initiatives have achieved high levels of adoption in the data center space, organizations are failing to fully optimize data center efficiency, a report of The Aperture Research Institute (ARI) released today at Datacenter Dynamics London concludes. The report found that while organizations have made strides in managing energy consumption, efforts to improve resource utilization and process efficiency lag significantly behind, resulting in costly inefficiencies at the data center and IT infrastructure layers.
The report, "Organizations Overlooking Significant Opportunities to Improve Efficiency and Reduce Expenses, Despite Adoption of Green Initiatives," examines responses from more than 100 data center professionals and concludes that most organizations are missing opportunities to optimize data center performance by neglecting to manage people and resources as part of their initiatives.
"The practice of data center performance optimization maintains that an optimized data center actually achieves not just energy efficiency, but resource and process efficiency as well," said Steve Yellen, principal of the Aperture Research Institute. "By focusing largely on energy efficiency, many organizations are not only missing opportunities to reduce costs, but preventing the initiatives they do have in place from achieving their full potential."
The survey found that 87 percent of participants have energy efficiency initiatives in place, up from 35 percent last year. While these strategies have achieved relatively high levels of adoption, the economic downturn is also forcing organizations to take a closer look at resource utilization. Thirty-two percent of respondents intend to focus on fully utilizing existing capacities to cope with reduced or stagnant budgets, and 19 percent plan to cut back on capital investments.
"Effective resource management enables organizations to proactively manage capacity and ensure that power and cooling resources are sized correctly and balanced with computing demand," said Yellen. "Nearly all of the respondents in the survey - 96 percent - believe they could better manage their resources to extract additional capacity, some by 30 percent or more. Opportunities to better manage resource utilization are not only plentiful, but financially beneficial, since they can delay capital investments by improving utilization and extending the life of available resources."
The report also identified opportunities to better manage resources at the data center IT infrastructure layer through the reduction of unproductive, or "ghost" servers. Ninety percent of respondents reported the presence of at least some ghost servers in their facilities, with 18 percent indicating that 11 percent or more of their servers are ghosts.
The task of managing configuration information was identified by the report as a leading opportunity to better manage process efficiency and improve staff effectiveness. Nearly half (49 percent) of survey respondents reported using three to five systems to document their infrastructures, furthermore, 67 percent of data center managers reported updating documentation in the data center manually. These ineffective and time consuming data collection processes result in the data center not being used as efficiently as it could be, effectively costing the organization money, the report concluded.
"As reduced budgets continue to challenge IT management to do more with less - or at least to do more with what they have - all three pillars of efficiency will become increasingly important to effective management of the data center," said Yellen. "By turning increased attention to resource and process efficiency, organizations stand to enhance the performance of their energy efficiency initiatives, and fully achieve performance optimization."
The Aperture Research Institute publishes research reports on a quarterly basis to provide current information and trends on enterprise data centers. The latest report is available for free download at www.apertureresearchinstitute.org.
About Aperture
Aperture software from Emerson Network Power is used to manage the physical infrastructure of data centers, reduce operational risk and improve efficiency through the planning and management of data centre resources and real-time monitoring of the environment. Emerson Network Power, a business of Emerson, is the global leader in enabling Business-Critical Continuity from grid to chip for telecommunication networks, data centers, health care and industrial facilities. Emerson Network Power provides innovative solutions and expertise in areas including AC and DC power and precision cooling systems, embedded computing and power, integrated racks and enclosures, power switching and controls, infrastructure management and monitoring, and connectivity. All solutions are supported globally by local Emerson Network Power service technicians.
About Emerson
Emerson, based in St. Louis, Missouri(USA), is a global leader in bringing technology and engineering together to provide innovative solutions to customers through its network power, process management, industrial automation, climate technologies, and appliance and tools businesses. Sales in fiscal 2008 were $24.8 billion and Emerson is ranked 94th on the Fortune 500list of America's largest companies.
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