Energy Conservation
The triple impact of high-density computing, rising data center energy consumption, and rising energy cost has elevated the importance of data center efficiency as a strategy to reduce costs, manage capacity and promote environmental responsibility
Consort's Green Initiatives
Consort has taken a holistic approach to energy conservation that enables at least a 50 percent reduction in datacenter power consumption. This broad set of measures proves that there is no silver bullet to solving these issues, and a multitude of innovative solutions are part of our strategy
Energy Efficient computing
Environmental, or green, issues directly influence Concert's strategy
One solution that Consort has employed is the establishment of an IT procurement policy that exploits the energy efficiency benefits of low power processors and high efficiency power supplies. Since Consort is establishing new state-of-the art data centers, we're not burdened with an inefficient legacy infrastructure. Part of our plan moving forward into the future is to constantly replace our servers at the end of their useful lifecycle with units having the latest and greatest power efficiency ratings. Consort keeps a compliance database for going green initiatives and reducing the CO₂ footprint of computer hardware. Audits are performed on the equipment currently in use or in our service depots. An additional initiative is the deployment of blade servers and the implementation of virtualization techniques to provide better manageability and overall performance.
Consort makes full use of power management software applications to track peak and average utilization rates.
We see this as a great opportunity to establish some industry benchmarks and enhance the sophistication of our tools and methodologies. Our software will be able to control power distribution, smart cooling, heat emissions and energy cost allocations across heterogeneous server platforms. Additionally the tools can be used to allocate power to the most-appropriate server in a rack or in the whole data center. Conditions would be set based on business processes (business priority of certain applications over other applications) or energy costs. In this case, the tools become a key part of our sophisticated chargeback mechanism for customer to utilize within their own internal organizations. Looking further ahead, Consort's real-time infrastructure will be predicated on energy usage and costs. These tools will be enhanced to include data center environmental monitoring, such as mapping thermal contours. Such metrics would be used to set thresholds for allocating work to groups of servers across a data center floor.Other plans for the future include such measures as carbon accounting and enlisting supplier green credentialing from independent third parties. Consort is willing to assume a leadership role in helping to preserve the environment. We carefully consider our green footprint along with the traditional metrics such as price, quality, service delivery, and customer value.
Green Facilities
Consort works with its customers to construct the most energy-efficient IT infrastructure possible
When it comes to optimizing the environment support systems for our facilities, Consort employs tactics such as cooling best practices, 415V AC power distribution, variable capacity cooling, and continuous monitoring procedures. Another energy and cost saving benefit of the Consort Next-Generation data center is derived from its geographical location. We'll make use of economizers where possible such as wind turbines to generate electrical power in addition to directing outside air to cool the data center during the colder months of the year. These measure provide energy-free cooling for minimal expense while the cost benefits are passed on to our customers.
