Reducing Your Footprint
Take a
holistic approach combining computing, power and cooling management
technologies to reduce your overall energy consumption and carbon
footprint.
 At
the heart of this “Next Generation Data Center”
strategy is
the ability to deliver and support secure IT applications through
Virtualization. The virtualized, dynamic data center reduces energy
consumption and the number of servers needed while extending server
life. In turn you also extend the life of desktop equipment on client
side, while maximizing processing power at the Data Center.
Eco
– It’s About Economics AND Ecology
“Demand, cost and capacity are colliding and your Data Center
is
in the middle,” said Sun’s Paul Tatum at the recent
1105
Government Information Group seminar on Green IT.
Fact: According to the 2007 EPA ENERGY STAR® report to
Congress, in
2006, Data Centers spent $4.5 billion for 61 billion kilowatt-hours of
electricity annually – a number that is expected to double by
2011.
This
is more electricity than consumed by the nation’s color TVs
and
about the same consumption as 5.8 million households. Federal servers
and data centers alone account for approximately 6 billion kWh (10
percent) of this electricity use, for a total electricity cost of about
$450 million annually. And that’s before the recent skyrocket
in
energy prices.
Fact:
IDC says sometime between 2010 and 2015, the cost of
operating a server will exceed the cost of buying it.
Fact:
Gartner
says by this year, 50% of all current Data Centers will have
insufficient power and cooling capacity to meet the demands of
high-density equipment. And energy bills that have traditionally
accounted for less than 10% of an overall IT budget soon could account
for more than half.
That’s
the bad news. Now the good news according to Tatum: “The
opportunity is clear. You can cut energy costs in half; double your
space efficiency and increase server utilization levels to as high as
85%.”
The Drive
for Energy Efficiency
To gain these promised efficiencies means dealing with four separate
issues and combining solutions to reach the desired results explained
Tatum. The four areas are the Desktop, Data Center Computing Power,
Data Center Power/Cooling and Data Center Storage. Specifically you:
- Identify a subset of desktops to
virtualize.
- Identify and turn off unused machines
(typically 8-10% of machines).
- Enable power management features where
available.
- Refresh old servers; use trade-in and
rebate programs to help pay.
- Refresh disk technology (replace
<70GB drives with >500GB).
- Move old data to tape (tape provides
20x-200x more TB/KW).
The result of Sun consolidating and moving to more efficient Data
Centers was a hardware reduction that provided over a 450% increase in
compute power with about 1/2 the servers and over a 240% increase in
storage capacity with about 1/3 the storage devices.
The
emphasis is not just on virtualization, it’s creating an
ecosystem.The idea is to integrate the demand curve with cooling and
electricity.
That provided an over 60% reduction in energy costs ($860,000 savings
in 9 months), compressed Data Center space by 88% and reduced carbon
emissions by 3,227 metric tons annually. Tatum said Sun combined used
these strategies to save Sun $100 million annually.
The
Holistic Approach
The experience at Unisys is similar. “At Unisys we are a
consumer, a provider, and a consultant in this space. As a consumer, we
have a lot of equipment, and we have several large Data Centers and
have recently gone through a major revamp of our key Data Center where
we reduced our carbon footprint by about 67% through a major Green
initiative,” said Ed Vaccaro during the Federal Executive
Forum.
Vaccaro
points out Unisys is taking those same experiences and technologies and
offering to clients. So, when working with government clients
undergoing technology refreshes, Unisys is coming up with Green
strategies using virtualization and consolidation. They are taking a
holistic approach looking at the entire computing management, power
management, heating management, cooling management approach to reducing
the overall energy consumption and carbon footprint that the computing
resources use today.
Specifically in the Data Center, Vaccaro says the emphasis is not just
on virtualization, it’s creating an ecosystem. For example in
the
next generation of hardware platforms, the chips have the ability to
turn themselves on and off. The computing ability is right on the
processor, so you are not drawing power when it’s not being
utilized.
“Right now today we’ve built most of our Data
Centers for
peak utilization,” explained Vaccaro, “which is why
the
average utilization is only 35 – 40%. No service provider
wants
to know that their customer is really upset when
they are hitting peak loads and they can’t get good response
time.”
The idea is to integrate the demand curve with cooling and electricity.
Then put tools in place that monitor and provisions all of this so you
can actually see what is going on here said Vaccaro. “Because
remember we are selling these circuits so we have to provision them; we
have to bill; we have to tell the customer what you are
using.” |
