Figuring out how to implement the right efficiency plan in the data center is a daunting task.  I often start discussions with customers by asking "How much electricity does your data center use?" and "How much are you paying for electricity?"  While these may seem like such amazingly fundamental questions, you'd be surprised by how many people don't know the answers or respond with "Let me go and look that up."

Further confusing the issue is vendors claims about what they can achieve.  Have you heard the marketing campaign about virtualization reducing your energy bill by 80%?  Sounds compelling right?  The trouble is, you're not going to virtualize every server in your facility and shut off every chiller.  Let's say 20% of your servers can be virtualized (such as staging, dev, and test), and your servers consume 70% of your IT energy consumption, which is 45% of your facility's energy consumption.  So if we add that up, .8*.2*.7*.45 = 5%.  That means that, for your data center, 80% savings just became 5%.

This means that data centers really need to figure out what their strategy is.  And, of course, you want the biggest bang for your buck.  By measuring your baseline, applying the various strategies to it, and calculating ROI, a plan can be formulated that makes sense of the efficiency measures for your specific facility.  I've written an eWeek HowTo titled How To Achieve 40% Energy Savings In Your Data Center.

In the last week, Forrester analyst Doug Washburn posted his list of 6 Steps to Energy Efficiency in the Data Center.  Doug points at a number of interesting things we can do.  But what I really like about Doug's post is that 5 of the 6 items are IT actions.  Rationalizing your application portfolio and evaluating virtualization against SLAs are two things you should certainly be evaluating when putting together an efficiency strategy.  Storage is often overlooked, and there's certainly opportunities there.  And I've been saying for a while to just raise the data center temperature.  But remember, at the end of the day, you've got to focus your priorities where you'll get the biggest return with the least disruption in service.  And that's where the baseline and a vetted strategy will be key to success.