Everyone’s going Green. Come-on now, get on the Green Train! Data Centers are going Green. Mobility is now a Green enabler; so is UCC; so is virtualization. It’s fitting that there is so much focus on Green in IT. After all, Mr. Green Jeans himself, Al Gore, has always been a friend to IT; he even invented the Internet ;-). Seriously, all this talk of Green makes me see red. Not red as in “I’m against it” (I’m all for it) but red in terms of performance metrics continually spiking into the red zone. Will the Green IT Manager have the right tools?

So much of Green IT is about performance optimization in conjunction with reduction in footprint (environmental, HVAC and rack space). From our research we know organizations are moving to higher performance servers with virtualization and running these servers at much higher utilization than currently exists in the data center. Meanwhile, some IT managers are raising the temperature of their data centers to run hotter and greener at the same time. Increased utilization, increased temperature both mean that the operating tolerances are shrinking. For example, if there is an HVAC failure today there is enough thermal mass in the data center (things are cold enough) to handle an orderly shut down of systems (and DR moves) before heat in the data center becomes critical. With a data center running at a higher temp, the buffer shrinks dramatically between safe shut down and melt down!

This all points to the need for more effective event management. Like good robots, today's event managers do a great job of alerting on pre-set triggers: high temp, high utilization, HVAC failure, power failure, etc. Unfortunately, triggering is easy, what's difficult is figuring out where to set the triggers. This difficulty drives Operators to set triggers at what they "think" is a safe operating margin. However, this margin is being eroded as data centers move into the red as they move to Green. To effectively adjust the triggers to meet these tighter tolerances, Green IT managers will need to analyze massive volumes of disparate data - on a regular basis - to discern the right trigger points to set for their event management systems. IT Search is the perfect approach to search, correlate and trend across events from IT systems, HVAC and building access systems to generate these event trigger points.