The afternoon sessions were as enlightening as this morning. John Phelps had a great presentation on Green IT. He started out with the statement that companies were not doing Green IT for environmental reasons, but for cost savings and the environment benefited from the work. My colleague agrees. He went extensively into the topic, including pointing out reasons why Green IT is more than power and cooling savings. He finished discussing using alternate energy sources and predicted future trends in the space. McKinsley Quarterly published an article on this subject too.

The last presentation of the day was Cameron Haight’s “Managing the Virtual Server Environment.” Cameron covered the gamut of management considerations – too many to cover in this blog. He states that virtualization has changed the operations landscape probably more radically than at any other time in IT history, pointing out the benefits of virtual environments and the detractions. Server sprawl is the number one issue for people implementing virtualization and Haight covered options and considerations to control it.

He covered the need for chargeback and the difficulties in implementing and sustaining it. If you have time, watch this chargeback video and tell me what you think.

Cameron closed with staffing considerations, saying benefits will vary widely depending on complexity and individual configurations. He pointed out that 55% of those polled said there was no change in Server per IT Staffing ratios after implementing virtualization. He presumed some of the reasons are that although some admin tasks were greatly reduced, such as provisioning, the complexity of the environment drove greatly elongated root cause analysis times, resulting in no staffing ratio benefits.

 Tomorrow is another day and more reports will be forthcoming. 

Until tomorrow. 

Ron