Audit thyself: New energy evaluation service looks at the total IT, facilities picture

Have you managed to get a handle yet on exactly WHAT you might be able to do in your data center to reduce your power profile? Or are you just kind of poking around with tactical initiatives? (Which, by the way isn't a BAD thing. After all, Deloitte's CIO just admitted in some remarks this morning that the services company has never measured its carbon footprint.)

So, if you're like Deloitte and haven't gotten around to actually measuring your baseline power profile yet, IT consulting firm Acumen Solutions and electrical design firm KTA Group got together to announce at Uptime Institute's Lean, Clean & Green IT Symposium that they are teaming up to provide a new Data Center Energy Audit service.

Basically, the two companies will come in and evaluate the total picture: not just the electrical and cooling systems in your data center facility but also the server equipment, the network, applications and anything else in the IT realm that eats up power in same. The companies will then serve up recommendations about how to reduce power consumption of the existing infrastructure or how the business might be able to grow within its current footprint. (Seems like it should look at both, no? Probably it does.)

Anyway, as you probably know, U.S. government figures have shown that only about one-third of the power in an average data center (I don't know what "average" is, sorry) goes to the IT equipment. The rest comes from cooling, lights, and the power system itself. Thus, the need to have both sets of equipment evaluated if you really want to impact how much electricity you use in your data center as a whole.

And, of course, after the audit, the two consulting firms will be more than happy to help you act on their recommendations. (What else did you expect?)

If the energy audit doesn't uncover cost-savings ideas that are at least equivalent to the audit fee, the companies will waive their fee. (The guarantee covers only data centers with at least 5,000 square feet of space or more than 150 servers in operation.) Nuff said.