HEEP: High-Efficiency Enterprise Planning
The Environmental Protection Agency recently presented a report to Congress that spells out the issues with escalating data center power consumption, and makes three primary recommendations to organizations for tackling this problem:
- Gain an inventory of your IT assets, the power they consume and how long they have been in service.
- Distribute this information to all relevant parties, not only IT team members. Share the information with facilities management teams, financial personnel and business managers for true collaboration.
- Plan for efficiency. Maintain a rigorous hardware lifecycle management plan, making sure you are retiring older, less efficient equipment, and compare the power efficiency of the different vendors for similar platforms.
Left unchecked, it is likely that your utility bills will practically double in the next five years, a potential increase of 15% for next year alone. This is a net increase in your IT budget of up to 7% or more, and with nothing to show for the increase; no new applications, network improvements, or storage space purchased. In fact, almost half of all IT costs are for power consumption.
It is now possible to reverse this trend and eliminate these common barriers between your organization and High-Efficiency Enterprise Planning (HEEP):
- Inadequate monitoring: Power consumption and inventory data for your assets must be comprehensively collected and managed, and must be readily available at a centralized location.
- Lack of knowledge: Information about utility costs and IT asset consumption is rarely available to members of an organization, let alone shared between them.
- Split incentives between IT and facility management: IT looks to keep the data infrastructure going and the facilities look to keeping the physical infrastructure going. These lines are blurring in some cases and collaboration is a requirement.
HEEP Methodology
The HEEP method is a simple series of steps organizations must follow to ensure that they are on the path to comprehensive data center efficiency planning.
- Inventory : Create and maintain a complete asset inventory.
- Monitoring : Track vital statistics on all assets, including utilization, power and cost.
- Metrics : Collect key information that provides insight into your data center environment.
- Planning : Coordinate infrastructure deployment, operations management and hardware lifecycle in a collaborative environment.
Basic Keys to Success:
High-efficiency enterprise planning (HEEP) is the goal. By following the HEEP methodology, organizations have a strategy that can curb and even reduce power consumption:
- Collect energy use data by devices and by location.
- Apply power utilization metrics to business practices.
- Collect existing power consumption information.
- Target high use areas in the enterprise (i.e. data center).
- Establish a platform to draw effective sponsorship.
With this data collected, managed and distributed anywhere in the enterprise, organizations will be able to:
- Collaborate between business units, data center managers and utility companies.
- Plan and track the consolidation of storage assets.
- Develop strategic long term plans to deploy energy efficient systems.
- Increase awareness of power consumption among business, facilities and IT managers
