A funny thing happened at lunch the other day. I was dining with several area CIOs when one fellow asked the table whether or not they were able to realize any electricity savings from their virtualization efforts. You may recall from Why start a Virtualization Blog? or Virtualization: The Importance of a Story to Tell that few companies account for electricity or floor space in their server charge-back models. Since the highest priorities are usually backed by financial incentives, one could reasonably assume that electricity was not on the executive RADAR.

Perhaps that is about to change. Not only did a CIO ask about electricity savings, but another answered with an impassioned (well... as impassioned as C-level executives get) story involving virtualization waves and power consumption graphs. If your CIO hasn't asked for electricity consumption trend data, she soon will. Are you ready for that? Right now CIOs have to be content with gross data, such as consumption of major data center zones, or perhaps the entire data center. Soon they will ask for per-rack or per-server data. They'll ask you to prove the ROI you claimed for that last technology refresh by comparing the electricity consumption of old vs. new servers within the same application server farm. You will not be able to provide that information without metering power distribution units like APC's Switched Rack PDUs.

I hate advocating new hardware and I mentioned the difficulty I see in justifying an electrical infrastructure upgrade in today's economy. However, some things just aren't possible without the right equipment. Have you looked at the power consumption of your SAN storage inventory? Every hot running disk array you buy today is another one you'll have to write off when your boss really gets interested in power bills. My advice is to get ahead of the curve. Start building the infrastructure you need to measure the savings that your vendors are claiming. And trust me... if electricity isn't one of the claimed savings, it soon will be!