To manage the growing challenges associated with data centres in today's times, organisations are increasingly opting for solutions like virtualisation and other green technologies. IT heads are under tremendous pressure to optimise the use of storage devices to improve organisational efficiency. Data centres in use are seen to consume lots of energy and also emit heat, which is harmful for the environment. This is making organisations realise the value of re-assessing the usage of old storage devices instead of blindly adding new servers to improve storage efficiencies. All this implies revamping of data centre strategies to balance shrinking IT budgets and availability of new technologies in the market.

S K Sharma, executive director and CIO, Engineering Projects India, says, "We are facing problems concerning cooling though we have deployed both storage and server virtualisation. With the growing volume of data, we are not only adding servers but also looking for solutions, which can take care of disasters or any kind of data loss. We are now looking at optimising our data centre resources and want to try new technologies available in the market to make our data centre green."

If companies can’t wait to join the green IT bandwagon, vendors too are not far behind with their green offerings. Praveen Sahai, head, Marketing and Corporate Affairs, EMC, says, "Adding more servers won’t solve the data centre problems that organisations face. They should instead adopt a different approach and ensure that their devices are optimised at 80 percent level or more. The cost of virtualisation technologies has gone down and there are also many energy-efficient options available in the market today."

As the cost of manpower reaches new heights every day, CIOs have no option but to invest in automation of storage processes. Organisations are relocating rudimentary data centres from multiple sites to a centralised, focussed data centre and are consolidating server and storage devices in order to gain efficiencies, improve utilisation rates and to reduce difficulties to manage server sprawl. Finally, firms are also looking at asset optimisation and adopting a life-cycle approach to planning and management of key assets.

Indian enterprises have already realised the importance of a green data centre and its benefits. Though some organisations have already implemented virtualisation, there are many more considering their decisions related to virtualisation. These organisations seem to be ready to adopt next generation data centres that can help them solve the problem of power consumption, cooling and costs.

Tridib Bordoloi, head-IT, The Express Group, says, "Recently, we have implemented an ERP solution from SAP and are now building a data centre. To keep pace with our constant efforts to upgrade our IT infrastructure, we are seriously looking at building an efficient data centre, which has virtualisation technologies in place." The Express Group's move is merely a reflection of the wider corporate scenario in the country.