The Convergence Of It And Facilities: Call Of The Hour

de, organizations are seeking energy-saving initiativesmeeting business objectives? How do they get best
to check rising costs and carbon emissions as theyreturn on investment (ROI)?
have to manage their power-hungry data centers.If an organization purchases even a well-designed,
Further, these data centers consume more energyup-to-date data center, it depends heavily on Facilities
than necessary and the organizations are obstructedsystems over which the IT team rarely has much
by a division between IT and Facilities, which arevisibility or control for its working efficiently. Hence,
both inter-dependent.there is real time need for a collaborative effort from
If IT and Facilities could work collaboratively,the two independent systems so that they can
organizations can operate more efficiently andsupport systems that impact service level
effectively while still meeting their businessagreements (SLAs), reliability, costs and carbon
objectives. It means that with convergingfootprint.
interdependent functions, organizations can serveUnified monitoring—the essential foundation for
dynamics to respond energy conditions, balancingconvergence
workloads and improve efficiency with optimumOrganizations can unite the IT and Facilities
power usages.infrastructure, which optimizes real-time visibility into
The necessary convergence of IT and Facilitiespower conditions and both systems, can easily see
In our data centers, the amount of digital data beingwhen abnormal conditions threaten the IT
stored, shared and manipulated is growing fast asinfrastructure and exactly which business services are
much as 25-50 percent a year. To handle suchat risk. For example, after an overload in the circuit,
growth, according to latest data, we require at leastsend an alert notification to IT and Facilities, which
600 percent increase in server installations andshould trigger the system to work on the
storage expanding nearly 70 times in the first decadere-scheduling of the loads on the data center.
of next millennium. This enthusiastic growth comes atCapabilities made possible by converging IT and
a price and requirement for more energy leading toFacilities
more operational energy.It will monitor power and thermal information, alerting
The IT department can tell you exact serverthe IT about it. It will incorporate energy into Facilities
utilization, computing capacity and network traffic,asset management workflows and control its power
but available power capacity, battery runtimeusage. The firm can track all the changes in energy
available and cooling capacity is determined byusage over time and draft its policy accordingly. Now,
Facilities. If both group work separately, the optimumthe firm can determine optimal location for new
balance between cost and reliability will get disturbed.servers and also tries for government rebates and
Hence, the potential efficiencies and advantages areincentives.
missed altogether. For example, the low priced serverConclusion
might be so power-hungry that it is the costlierIn the typical firm, IT and Facilities teams operate
choice over the long term.independently, but if they work in a holistic approach,
Now, organizations have to check, whether they canthey can optimize its function and can dramatically
reduce energy costs and carbon footprint whilechange the performance of the company.