'Greening' lowers operational costs for enterprises, while reducing carbon emission The 'go green' message is slowly touching the heart of enterprises' it infrastructure - the data centre. Faced with mounting costs of technology deployment as they scale up, enterprises are scouting for alternative options that address the overall efficiency of their it infrastructure and bring down spiralling costs. "The problem with data centres built 10-20 years ago is that more than half of their energy costs are spent just on the facilities," says Natarajan Viswanathan, managing director, Hitachi Data Systems India, one of the vendors proactively working at setting up the new concept of green data centre. "However, growing concerns about global warming will drive legislation to reduce energy consumption and carbon footprints. And, we will see data centres replaced or outsourced to more efficient ones," he adds. A data centre is the facility in an enterprise, which houses the computer systems and the associated components such as servers and security devices. In a conventional data centre, there is a lot of power consumption (towards air-conditioning to keep the servers cool). A green data centre, meanwhile, seeks not only to lower operational costs for enterprises but also to reduce the carbon emission. They are becoming increasingly relevant as enterprises ramp up their it deployment to keep pace with growth. "Continuing to buy more of the same old storage architectures will no longer be an option," says Viswanathan. "Buying faster storage processors with larger capacity disks but on the 20-year-old architectures will not solve the problem of inefficient storage. New storage architectures are needed to meet the demand for better efficiency," he avers. The green data centre uses only products which are qualified as 'Green it' thus marking a big difference. Such a data centre is better than the normal ones starting from the building material (low emission building materials, carpets and paints), waste recycling, and use of alternative energy technologies like photovoltaic, heat pumps and evaporative cooling. The power efficiency through these measures leads to almost 30 per cent savings. Market is big enough According to leading analysts, the Indian data centre market is only worth $100 million today, with chances of going double by 2009. On the other hand, the total it spending by enterprises has crossed $50 billion, and is expected to reach $ 1 trillion by 2010. Analysts, therefore, feel the market is "big enough for the leading brands to have dedicated strategy for such (green data centre) opportunities." Industry estimates put the number of data centres in India at 600. Keeping an eye on this latent demand, Hitachi claims to have positioned itself at the forefront of the green data centre movement. "The new green data centre comprises Hitachi's itsg technology: storage systems, server and networking equipment," says Viswanathan. "In addition, other cutting-edge products that take advantage of Hitachi's r&d expertise in other key areas of technology have also been integrated into the development of the new data centre. Thermal hydraulic cooling devices, uninterruptible power supply (ups) systems and highly advanced power supply converters are designed to work in concert to contribute significant power, cooling and space benefits throughout," he explains. Hitachi claims to have the most eco-friendly and power-efficient data centre, achieving the lowest pue (a metric designed to measure the 'power usage efficiency' in data centre environments) Green Grid rating of 1.6, as against the 1.8 pue rating of its nearest enterprise-class competitor. "Our sophisticated data centre architecture is designed to offer the highest levels of energy efficiency and reduce carbon emissions by 20 per cent, while also lowering it management costs," claims Viswanathan. He believes that the demand for green data centre will only rise once the legal compulsion to store data comes in. "We are targeting both new data centres as well as converting older ones to green data centres," he says. Fujitsu, another player in the green data centre market believes these are early days for the concept. "In India, awareness and education for the need of such green data centre takes priority over than literally building it," Tosh Kataoka, general manager, it, Fujitsu India, says. "The green data centre will be a niche for some time. The cost factor attached to building green data centre is few times more than the normal ones," he adds. "It would be interesting to see who will emerge at the top as the market matures," Kataoka contends. "At this juncture it is too early to comment on any one particular brand. Fujitsu would be involved in terms of providing some of the infrastructure for data centre and also would like to provide consultancy on building them. This will be achieved directly or through appropriate partners and will have to evolve over a period of time that has not been fixed," he concludes.