Federal data centers are prime candidates for greener energy practices using technology and practices that minimize power consumption. One of the main incentives is the impending data center crisis. Today's blade servers have higher power densities than most data centers are designed to accommodate. For example, powering and cooling a fully populated 42-unit rack with six blade-server chassis can require 15 to 18 kilowatts – far more than today's data centers were designed to deliver. Indeed, Gartner forecasts that by 2008, half of all data centers will need a major overhaul due to higher cooling and power requirements.
Much of the discussion about greener data center practices to date has centered on power-efficient server chassis designs. However, the network architecture also plays a significant role. This article outlines three architectural approaches to the greening of federal data centers: storage virtualization, IT consolidation, and server farms.
