Sorry about the long gap in blog entries. I have been fully maxed out working on a client project looking at building a brand-new data centre.

Within the green IT space this is something that we typically try to avoid, as most organizations have ways of improving the efficiency of their existing environment that can negate the need for additional physical space and power. This was not the case with this client as the rate of growth in IT demand they have been experiencing has been too significant.

As part of the work we have identified a number of potential improvements that can be made to the IT environment to reduce the size of the new data centre, hopefully reducing the capital investment required while also reducing the operational expense of the existing IT environment –a win/win for the client and very nice for a business case. From a green IT viewpoint it is also great to see many of the items we have been talking about as future ideas being adopted as standard business practices. The proposed improvements rely heavily on reducing demand through decommissioning, consolidation and virtualization, increasing capacity through improved data centre layout and slowing future growth through process improvement activity.

By Andrew Skinner, UK Data Center Technology and Operations