Steve O’Donnell runs IT Internationally for the largest global credit, debit, gift and prepay card processing company in the world. Prior to this he was Global Head of Data Centres at BT running the largest data centre estate and the biggest IT Operation in Europe. He has a worldwide reputation as a thought leader in Green IT having won six industry awards for his 21st Century Data Centre vision and design.
O’Donnell became the first non manufacturer and first European based contributing member of The Green Grid when he took BT into membership. He is a professional member of the IEEE, the IET and the British Computer Society.
In this blog he shares his ofttimes controversial and always personal view about what a modern Data Center and IT Operation should look like and how to ride the perfect storm of being green and cost effective at the same time.
“There are some basics that just need to be done to keep a data centre efficient and as green as possible.”
O’Donnell contends that the 20th Century Data Centre is dead and that modern green thinking has enabled the creation of a 21st Century Data Centre that uses significantly less energy than it’s 20th Century counterpart. Refrigeration, humidification, inefficient power protection and low equipment utilization are wasteful and unnecessary. Huge capital demands to build out new sites are unsustainable and equipment manufacturers need to wake up and smell the coffee by designing for fresh air cooling and DC power.
“With this dramatic cost advantage old inefficient sites will be forced to close. Global organizations are starting to wake up to the need to be dramatically more efficient in their use of power.”
O’Donnell has had a career in IT with over 29 years experience working up to and including board level in large multinational organisations in both international and domestic markets.
He has held senior positions at First Data, BT plc, Cable & Wireless, Lehman Brothers, and Deutsche Bank. In addition Steve has run a number of IT Consulting firms where for example he led the UK merger of Price Waterhouse and Coopers & Lybrand to form PWC.
“Green is just common sense; energy is not free (and the laws of supply and demand mean the more we use the more it costs per unit) so why waste it? I remember my Father being green decades ago because he hated wasting his hard earned cash on unnecessary bills!”
O’Donnell has industry recognized Green credentials - as the winner of six industry awards for green data centre projects.
