Going Green is always a popular subject these days.   One my RSS feeds to the Green Blog pointed me to this ComputerWorld article on ‘green data centers’.  As the opening paragraph nicely sums up “Rising energy costs and the need to consolidate IT infrastructure will force business managers to re-evaluate data retention policies and learn how much power every device in their data center consumes.”  According to a quote from the piece, getting that data is a big job.

“Mark O’Gara, vice president of infrastructure management at Highmark Inc., said the health care provider is already tweaking optimization across its two-year-old green data center and 28,000-square-foot raised-floor space used for IT. After the new data center was built, O’Gara said his next major task was to measure energy consumption for every piece of IT architecture in the facility.”

It got me thinking, would it really be that big a job using OPC?  You could use the OPC Server for Windows Performance Monitor to capture the ‘Power Consumption’ parameter on any machine running a Microsoft OS.  For all the other IT network pieces you would use the OPC Server for SNMP, since many of those devices provide a ‘Power Consumption’ OID.  Once you have OPC access to the data points, it’s just a matter of archiving the data for analysis.

Going ‘Green’ is much more than a buzz word or a stand on social responsibility.  For companies and data centers that are running thousands of IT assets it is becoming more and more important to figure out how much energy each device consumes and to find ways of cutting down on energy usage.  Industry advancements in server processor power management present an attractive opportunity to lower average server power consumption without impacting server performance or availability. Each new Microsoft platform offers more in the way of power savings options. Administrators can take advantage of these options to lower power and cooling operating costs that are made possible by processor power management technologies.

See you really can do more with less.