According to a report, Energy Aware Planning and Decision Making, the five imperatives for efficient data center energy management are:

Acquire visibility

Asset management is a pre-requisite for proactive energy management. Asset discovery solutions and CMDBs can be combined with application and service portfolio management and with DCIM tools which overlay energy consumption information, together forming a body of intelligence and insight that facilitates energy aware decision-making.

Assign responsibility

Effective management of IT-related energy consumption and risk relies on accountability: both for costs (who pays) and cost management. This is increasingly important as IT needs are met through a combination of external shared services and internal infrastructure.

Rationalize applications

When multiple facilities, software systems or physical assets exist that provide the same or very similar capabilities, there is a clear opportunity to consolidate. Such activities can often lead to a significant reduction in energy consumption, as well as other costs.

Optimize the infrastructure

Maturing technologies such as virtualization and private cloud computing allow resources to be allocated in a highly flexible way as demands change over time, with a further boost to utilization, which in turn optimizes energy use.

Manage dynamically

In any IT environment, demands are frequently changing, and it is a failure to keep up with this change that often leads to redundancy and waste. The answer is to put in place processes and tools that allow everything to be managed holistically from top to bottom on a continuous basis.

About the Report

The report was commissioned by CA Technologies and produced independently by industry analyst firm Freeform Dynamics.