6 steps towards a greener data centre

Businesses are steadily waking up to the fact that they’ve got a major drag on their bottom line right under their noses: the corporate data centre. The drag comes in the form of the massive energy bills these things incur–even ignoring environmental issues.

What’s heartening though, is that much can be done about this, from switching to more efficient technology, putting it all together a bit more sensibly and other relatively easy steps.

CIO has a great article outlining 6 steps that firms can take to make their data centre more efficient:

4. Think about the floor tiles: It’s the little stuff that matters.
If you are not planning or cannot plan for closely coupled cooling, there are still steps you can take to improve the efficiency of your cooling.

Plan to minimize the profile of cables and pipes you put under the raised floor in your machine room. This is the space that your CRAC units are using to push cold air toward your computers, and the effectiveness of energy used in cooling can be greatly increased if you can minimize the interruptions that air encounters. Minimizing under-floor obstructions can also help eliminate data center hot spots and prevent air handlers from working against one another.