I attended the 2007 Innovation Forum hosted by Indian tech giant, Tata Consultancy Services today. It was a forum focused on the connection between IT, outsourcing, and innovation – particularly how an IT services group such as TCS can be involved in helping their clients engage with more innovative technologies, rather than just low-cost outsourcing.

TCS has started a collaboration with the London School of Economics to explore how outsourcing can stimulate innovation and professor Jonathan Liebenau from the LSE talked to the forum about some new research he has performed on creating innovation ‘habitats’.

I found the presentation by a fairly small company called Cassatt really interesting though. Cassatt has a really exciting system that can control power use in data centres. They are partnering up with TCS to give them the scale to reach out across the world, and TCS clearly gets access to the innovative nature of the Cassatt solution so it looks like a good partnership.

Steve Oberlin, Chief Scientist at Cassatt, described some stats that set the scene for those who still doubt that efforts to explore data centre efficiency are worthwhile. He said that about $7.2bn was spent on running data centres in 2005 and the power requirements are going up by about 8-20% per year. A really interesting fact though is that the present 3-year cost of powering a server is now more than the cost of a server itself. That kind of fact does emphasise how important this can be – not just for creating a green ‘image’ for the company, but for the possibility to explore the creation of extensive new efficiencies.

Essentially, idle servers use a lot of power. We pay to heat them up and we pay to cool them down again, so active power management through the use of a service such as Cassatt makes a lot of sense. By outsourcing the power management of a data centre to a company such as theirs you can introduce business rules that ensure servers are switched off when not needed for any business activity, switched off when idle, switched off when power emergencies occur, and all the requirements for applications to be closed down gracefully can all be handled – of course servers can’t just be shut down like the lights in an office!

Services like that offered by Cassatt are clearly making the issue of how to explore green infrastructure a lot easier to manage and the great thing is that by actively taking some time to look at the efficiency of your infrastructure footprint, you will probably end up saving money and making what you have in the data centre perform better.