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Data center efficiency is the ratio between how much useful work is done and the total cost of IT. It seems like a simple equation, but it has Dave Wagner, solutions management director for Capacity Management and Provisioning at BMC Software, scratching his head. The problem, he says, is the price of oil. With energy costs rising as much as 30 percent per year, depending on where you live, the dollars you spend on power will soon surpass what you spend on servers. This poses a problem for data center managers who need to accurately manage capacity. We can measure the cost of power at the data center level and even down to the rack level, but there is no way to measure power consumed per server. If you've ever thought about "going green" in your data center, be sure to listen in.
Dave's blog, Twenty-First Century Capacity Management, has some thought provoking posts on this subject. He writes about the impact of global warming on IT and the data center thermal runway. And, he poses questions you might never have pondered. Here's one: If power is a bigger part of the cost equation than servers, shouldn't you be doing capacity management on power instead of on servers?
Resources
Dave Wagner's email: david_wagner@bmc.com
Bio
Dave Wagner is a solutions management director for Capacity Management and Provisioning at BMC Software. He is responsible for driving overall solution strategy, pricing, requirements, and positioning for BMC's families of proactive performance analysis, modeling, and dynamic provisioning and orchestration solutions across leading enterprise platforms and their associated application environments. He has spoken at numerous conferences including the Computer Measurement Group, the premier conference for resource management and performance evaluation professionals.
