The first step towards streamlining business and preventing leakages in budgets during times of economic slowdowns is obviously to ensure that th.e IT systems work efficiently by incorporating technologies like virtualization, consolidation, migrating to blade servers and having intelligent energy management solutions: In spite of these deployments, most companies end up saving only a marginal proportion of the expected outcome, bringing them back to level zero or worse still, in a few cases, spending more and getting no results.According to APC, the reason for this is that the IT functions better, but the auxiliary 'facilities' like UPS systems, cooling devices and back up power systems end up unchanged, and in spite of IT enhancements, they result in huge leakflges.

As an illustration, consider a scenario where 10 servers that were earlier run¬ning at 50% efficiency percentages were consolidated to 6 servers running at 80% efficiency each, eliminating the need for 4 servers and consequently the space and cooling. Even taking into consideration, the little extra power a blade server consumes, there is still tremendous benefits. But if the cooling systems remain unchanged, or are modified in an incorrect manner, the new architecture will not get sufficient cooling, resulting in malfunction, or worse, the magnitude of cooling and power requirements will be disproportionate to the new architecture.

An ideal starting point towards solving this problem is to understand the magnitude of saving that can be achieved with a mix and match of 'facility' changes. In order to aid enterprises, derive at these percentages,APC, on its website, has uploaded a bunch of free tools which give you a fair indication of what you can expect to save. For instance, The Data Center Efficiency Calculator allows you to indicate the date center capacity, current efficiency, current UPS systems in use, power costs, lighting details etc, and then allows you to make indicative changes to any of these or add-ons like blanking panels, deep raised floors, heat rejections pumps etc, and see the savings meter change dynamically. For example, a 300 KW data center having IT load, at typical Indian electricity charges, running on legacy UPS systems, with chilled water cooling system at single path power is likely to run at an efficiency with an annual electricity.



If row-based cooling is deployed and a high efficiency cooling system along with blanking panels and 'intelligent' lighting in the server room is installed, the savings percentage climbs, bringing down the annual energy. Whether the IT manager sees sense in these deployments for the overall cost benefit the company would derive is his/her call, but the tool is a reasonably comprehensive in its analysis ofloss reductions.

Similarly, there is a Data Center Capital Costs Calculator, which analyses pa¬rameters like installed labor charges, redundancy levels, and throws up pie charts that display percentages of cost burden on UPS, generator, switchgear ete. The Virtualization Energy Cost Calculator, on the other hand, allows the IT manager to get comparative prc,entages and graphs ef.ho","many servers can be consolidated and virtualized, depending on desired architecture of servers, pro-
jected load, and available space.

APC hopes that with these cost saving percentages, IT managers will realize t?e need to tackle the issue of inefficient hardware and consequently resort to modular power technologies, efficient' power distribution mechanism, rackbased cooling systems which involve superior technologies like in-row cooling, where all the hot air is collected and trapped in a corridor and processed to send air sideways across all server racks. Bundled with infrastructure performance monitoring tools, APC hopes that CIOs will realize the quick benefits during bad economic times of having efficient auxiliary data center components, which will help realize the benefits of technologies like virtualization and newgeneration servers.