Metering and Managing Energy Consumption in Data Centres

I attended the  Metering and Managing Energy Consumption in Data Centres workshop in Leeds last Tuesday. The event, attended by at least 20 delegates and had 4 speakers, offered real insight into how to manage and monitor your data centres energy use. Rob Bristow has already blogged extensively on the event (see Rob’s Blog) so there’s not much point in me repeating the details of the event, except to reiterate the main outputs from the workshop.

They were;

1.  there are many and varied methods of collecting and then monitoring the energy use of data centres. Energy meters that work for one server may not integrate with another. Continuing to try several different methods, types of equipment and points of monitoring until energy usage is being measures, is key!

2. Once data has been gathered, the most important aspect is following through on initiatives that will reduce energy consumption.
This is easier than many IT managers realise. The SUSTE-TECH project ran 2 Data Centre Efficiency workshops, the slides of which are available on the EAUC’s SUSTE-TECH website: The slides contain very useful information on the number of ways to green your data centres and even offer examples of best practice. www.http://www.eauc.org.uk/workshops.

Slides from the Metering and Managing Energy Consumption in Data Centres workhop are available on

http://www.goodcampus.org/events/info.php?siteID=&refnum=65&startnum=A0