Data Centre Specialist Group

On Wednesday the 7th May the DCSG took part in a Grid Computing Now web seminar which you can view here.

This event focussed on energy and cost both within the data centre and at the desktop. The first presentation by Nic Barnes presented the practical experience and measurement data from Merrill Lynch in server and desktop virtualisation. The presentation provides a very interesting practical perspective on the real world cost and energy benefits of thin clients and 'desktop virtualisation', what the factors are and what consolidation ratios you need to achieve to break even on cost and carbon. The work done by Nic and his team at Merrill Lynch is impressive as they have taken considerable trouble both to collect quantitative data and to understand the delivery financial and environmental costs of their services to the business.

The second presentation by the DCSG Secretary examines whether we are asking the wrong questions about energy use in ICT and presents the argument for per service accounting and targeting the user demand in place of the IT and data centre operators. We then explore some of the complexities in data centre energy use and accounting and provides some example analysis from the DCSG model of financial and energy cost of IT systems comparing different deployment options.