Author: Robert Gast
To make your IT infrastructure more environmentally friendly you must first need to sow the seeds of change. Here are several ideas for greening your silicon patch, presented in a two part series.
Part One
It took some convincing but now it’s clear that there are an abundant number of reasons to pursue a higher level of earth consciousness. In less than a decade the public discussion on seeking more energy efficient technologies for the data center has shifted from one driven by seemingly transient and superficial hype-cycle messaging to a series of responsible core corporate values with empirical social and business benefits.
For businesses, the kernel of the conservation discussion is where green ideas convert into greenbacks. To wit, conserving resources saves money, period. Consider the following:
- Greening your infrastructure reduces power and cooling costs because green technology, which is more efficient than older hardware platforms, requires less energy.
- Greening through the consolidation of servers and sites leads to more efficient management of data centers, which translates into cost savings for you.
- Green IT is composed of several technologies that all have the goal of reducing power consumption and overall data center footprint, consolidating locations and resources, and improving the efficiency of operations.
Indeed, discussions of green technology now extends beyond the public relations department. Once fervent perennial antagonists, corporations and environmentalists are now—occasionally—converging on the points of clean, healthy, sustainable, and more contentious. The common ground between environmental responsibility and corporate profitably can be observed in the following overarching elements of a green IT strategy:
- Server or site consolidation provides a more flexible and efficient platform that helps reduce power consumption. Consolidation usually means migrating several physical systems to virtual machines that run on one or a few physical servers. This need not be a complicated or expensive undertaking. Real-time and live migration products take the pain out of migrating to new infrastructure, including eliminating most, or all of the downtime necessary to do so.
- The energy savings available from server consolidation can be considerable. A typical x86-based server consumes between 30 and 40 percent of its maximum power even when is idle. Consolidating underused servers onto a single physical server eliminates much of that energy wastage by reducing the number of idling systems.
There is one caveat to consider: When consolidating infrastructure, evaluate your disaster recovery plan and the ability to protect your architecture from failure. A virtualized blade server rack can host dozens of servers, each of which may contain eight to ten virtual hosts. Because there are more servers in a single rack space, redundancy becomes more important. Should a physical system hosting several virtual servers fail, the interruption to business operations will be more significant than for a single, pre-consolidation physical server failure. This increased risk means that it is even more important to provide comprehensive disaster recovery and fault tolerance for consolidated infrastructure than for unconsolidated servers.
Implementing virtualization technologies helps with consolidating environments and also provides the flexibility to use only the power required to run those virtual machines. Instead of multiple single servers dedicated to a single function, multiple workloads can run on one machine even when the workloads employ different operating systems. Once physical servers have been converted to virtual servers, the data center will see the benefits of more efficient processing.
