Going green might not be as simple as consolidating your data center onto a few mid-sized servers and going virtual, according to an article on Network World by Tom Henderson. At odds in the lab work reported by Tom are the server side interest in dropping CPU usage to a low hum when not in use, versus the virtualization model of powering the CPU up to full throttle, and letting the virtual platform's hypervisor technology allocate the resources.

Mixing a server's built in "green" process with the space, heating, and cost savings of virtualization can seem at odds, especially where the green process intends to cut power consumption on servers. It becomes a question of where the value might be best realized. Seems like it might be a math problem in some ways. Is the percentage of power consumption realized by each server's greening higher or lower than the power savings realized by consolidating several servers into a smaller footprint.

How did YOU make your decision on this? What are your choices with regards to going green with your data centers? We'll talk about some of this with our Next Data Center conversations and event over the coming months. What's your take? Send email to [email protected] to talk more about this.