Green your data centre – without ending up in the Job Centre

Budget and planet-saving technology ideas

Play nice with networking

Look at the green options for your network kit, too. In reality, there's not a vast amount you can do with power savings on switches and routers. However, even if you save a few watts by having (say) the switch run inactive ports at low power, and ensure that the fans are thermostatically controlled rather than just hammering away all the time, then it's a start – so long as it doesn't cost you much to implement.

Storage is another power sucker and the vendors are keen to try to promote their green credentials. Now, a data centre's not like your laptop: you can't just spin down all the disks when they seem inactive because of the lag of spinning them back up when something wants to read from them. So in reality, a storage vendor's approach to greenness is largely about choosing the number and type of disks wisely.

Flash storage will save power, but will cost you more to buy than spinning disks, and if you want to stick with spinning disks then the same's true with cheap SATA drives (which are perfect for non-speed-critical applications) compared with more high-end ones.

And the vendors will also tell you to go virtual, for the reasons I've already mentioned, and to ensure you turn on all the de-duplication options in order to reduce the total storage space requirement (the performance hit is generally modest).

Oh, and to be fair, you'll find that they do actually spin down disks when they're not required, but of course the controllers do it cleverly so as not to impact service excessively.

Do I go green?

You should always consider the greenness of the data centre because it has a direct tendency to save you money. Use less power and you'll pay less. If you use less power by virtualising and having less kit then you'll pay less for both power and data centre space. And if you avoid using your own kit entirely and throw it on someone else's cloud, then you're even greener and most likely more efficient too.

You should indeed look at the green credentials and policies of your data centre provider. If you have two providers with roughly equal technical credentials then the environmental awareness aspect of what they do is a key part of their overall ethical trading approach: and you know, I think that matters.

A note of caution, though: remember what industry you're in and what your purpose is within your organisation. If you're called to explain to the CEO why his finance system was down for 36 hours at year-end while you were hugging trees with your data centre manager, the meeting's unlikely to end well.

Your job is to provide your organisation with a suitable level of service and an accepted level of reliability, and if you can do that with a green undertone then great – and there are many, many providers who can help you do so.

Green technology that sounds like science-fiction is gradually becoming not just fact but second nature. Hence, you're becoming increasingly able to run your world efficiently in terms of both power and money.

Just don't sacrifice service levels to save a squirrel – you'll end up sacrificing your career instead. ®