As you develop your IT strategy for the next five to seven years, you, an IT executive, will be asked to support a growing number of new business initiatives within the constraints of a shrinking to flat IT development budget. You are already spending a disproportionate amount of your budget on maintaining the existing data centers. You have insufficient capital expenditure to develop your environment necessary for meeting these new and growing business services. You need to think outside the box. You need to think “energy.”

Here’s one perspective: To efficiently manage your data center, you need to know the actual energy usage of all your assets to prevent over-provisioning while meeting peak demands. By using energy consumption and cost as the base indicator for your data center performance, you can quickly and dynamically balance your compute load with your IT infrastructure -- giving you the elasticity you need to match demand cycles.

This asset-centric approach to energy management simultaneously balances workloads with IT footprint, frees up operational cash flow, and gives you an elastic data center infrastructure. This approach helps you to meet your data center performance objectives, by dynamically balancing your workloads with IT capacity allocation.

Energy is your most constrained asset and one of the most expensive assets. By focusing on energy consumption, allocation, and cost, you gain real-time visibility into your data centers with an ability to make real-time business decisions. Energy management can transform IT into a business function. If business runs on IT, and IT runs on energy, then energy is the key to driving your business agility.

As a CIO supporting an enterprise, you want to use energy metrics to help you match IT performance with needs. As a Service Provider, you will need to match pricing with actual usage, as customers are now demanding this from their co-lo providers.

Either way, energy is the common denominator. Get control of your energy asset. Measure it, manage it, allocate it to critical applications, and provision it to meet business needs. Flex your infrastructure to meet your business demands.