Onstor Survey Confirms Data Centers Running Out of Juice

Published: September 26, 2007

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

IT vendors try to make money off trends, just like the rest of us. Power and cooling issues are big deals in data centers these days, so it comes as no surprise that vendors of all manner of IT gear are trying to figure out how to capitalize on concern over power use in general and specifically at data centers that are running out of power and cooling as they expand their infrastructure faster than they can get power into existing or new data centers.

Clustered network storage vendor ONStor recently commissioned a survey of IT decision makers to get a sense of what they think about power, cooling, and space issues in their data centers; 369 people responded to the survey. Some 63 percent of those polled said that their data center had unexpectedly run out of power, cooling, or space. Which says that the need for capacity is clearly outrunning the ability to do capacity planning. About 40 percent of respondents do not have any sort of "green" initiatives at their companies, which is not good. But the good news is that 60 percent of those surveyed said they have a green plan in place, would have one in the next two years, or have talked about it with management. (Linking those three ideas to make a large number is silly, isn't it?)

"We know from conversations with our customers that data center power consumption amidst the exorbitant growth of data is a key concern for CIOs and other IT professionals," said Bob Miller, chief executive officer at ONStor. "What we find most interesting from this survey is how many executives aren't implementing solutions to address these challenges. There's a disconnect between having an awareness of the need to lower power consumption in the data center and doing something about it."

Among those polled, 40 percent said that they would "go green" if it saved them between 20 and 50 percent on power and cooling costs; a third said that they would do it to save between 10 and 20 percent on power and cooling. And another 11 percent said that they favored creating a chief energy officer position at their firms. That sounds like a good idea to me.

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