(Scott Lowe, TechRepublic) With companies doing everything possible to conserve cash, conserving power has quickly become an important part of the IT portfolio. No longer is physical server sprawl an option; in terms of both hardware acquisition costs and ongoing energy and cooling costs, the “throw hardware at the problem” crowd is being replaced by people that attempt to virtualize everything and do everything possible to keep that energy bill low.

The right storage solution in the data center works directly toward the green goal, particularly when the storage solution sports the right feature set. Allow me to explain.

The disk shelves themselves
Shared storage itself in the form of a SAN can help organizations reduce their carbon footprint by using less electricity. Consider this: Historically, before the days of virtualization, organizations often purchased physical servers that were built for long-term use. As such, that initial server configuration was more than likely to be overkill for the originally intended solution. That over-engineering generally included the number of disks housed in the server. After all, even though a server was being purchased for a specific task, who knew exactly what would be required in the future?

The result: In general, physical x86-based servers were horribly underutilized, both from a storage and processing perspective. Even though the server wasn’t running at full capacity, it still required power to run all of the processors originally specified as well as the disk spindles originally included with the unit.