I had a very interesting conversation this week about the potential use of IT monitoring and management tools as a means of effectively controlling the electricity consumed in the delivery of IT services. I was talking with Danny Bradbury, a freelance journalist, on this topic as he was looking for some opinions on what could be done today and what might happen tomorrow. Danny and I started off with, on a the face of it, a not unreasonable premise that if you know what IT resources you have operational in the business then surely it must be possible to consider the energy that each component (server, router, storage array, PC etc.) draws down and it must therefore be possible to start managing the IT infrastructure with an eye on energy use.

Now in theory this is certainly a possibility as we can certainly take steps to identify what is the rated energy consumption of each major piece of equipment and, indeed, this matter already taxes the minds of each and every data centre manager working in any of a steadily growing number of data centres where it is now next to impossible to get any more power into the building. This is a reality for many centres in parts of the US, especially California, and a number of city centre locations in Europe, notably parts of central London and the Docklands.

Unfortunately whilst the theory of knowing exactly what IT equipment is in place, who is using it and in support of what business process is simple, it is very clear that very few organisations have this information available. This is strange as the tools available today to undertake such basic inventory discovery processes are now well established and relatively straight forward to use. In fact when they are in turn coupled with looking at the software operational on the platforms discovered and appropriate financial and contractual details are added it is well established today that "asset management", which is what we are describing here, can deliver valuable operational, business and financial benefits.

However it is also the fact that even with the best asset management system deployed and with an update inventory to hand there will still be a major gap between the IT / financial information held and garnering any knowledge of the power draw down of each system. To the best of my knowledge such details would need to be added by hand. This could be a time consuming and labour intensive process which would be unlikely to prove to be justifiable in purely financial terms. Instead it is my contention that armed with a comprehensive asset /inventory of equipment deployed there would be far easier targets to limit power consumption, especially by focussing of the improving the effective use of IT assets and considering undertaking now well established consolidation and virtualisation projects goaled at improving overall asset utilisation.

Will there come a time when "standard" IT infrastructure monitoring and management tools, perhaps functioning alongside sophisticated building energy management systems could run in such a fashion to allow management by power consumption? Maybe, but that day is still some way in the future. Today efforts are better spent on optimising infrastructure utilisation and designing more energy efficient data centres. These are straight forward tasks, although by no means cost free.