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Today, Global 2000 organizations are focusing on their energy consumption. Consumers, governments, and businesses are aligning around the challenges, addressing the costs of climate change and global warming. Organizations work with DataSynapse to initiate corporate IT strategies that reduce greenhouse gases and energy consumption.
What is Green IT:
The drivers of Green IT are clear - businesses own social responsibilities; the growing pressure from environmentalists and, increasingly, the general public for governments to offer green incentives; as well as the opportunity for long-term cost savings realized by lowering energy consumption.
Globally, governments are starting to take notice - energy consumption in the data center was at the forefront of issues put forth by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to the federal government in the last few months. The increase in power consumption is so dramatic that the US government is getting involved to address this issue through policy changes, incentives, and mandates to federal datacenters, etc.
The cost pressures of power and cooling are also very significant for Global 2000 businesses – according to analyst firm IDC [1], “Roughly 50 cents are spent on energy and cooling for every dollar spent on computer hardware. This is expected to increase by 54 percent to 71 cents over the next four years. Globally it is approximated that IT is responsible for 2% of all carbon releases.”
The design and resource provisioning models of most data centers only multiplies the cost issues for large companies. Most organizations allocate a fixed set of servers and computing resources to meet an application’s peak workload, and this application-centric model is repeated for every application hosted in the data center. And since most applications only run at peak workload a fraction of the time – average utilization of server capacity is approximated at between 5% to 10%. Low utilization is an area where DataSynapse customers have a clear market opportunity to reduce carbon footprint and costs.
DataSynapse and Green IT:
One clear strategy that can raise utilization in the data center is virtualization. Hypervisor based virtualization vendors like VMware, Microsoft, and Citrix have solutions that enable consolidation opportunities by providing tools to run multiple virtual machines on physical machines. Hypervisor based virtualization increases utilization of the physical machines and thus enables energy efficiency.
Most hypervisor based virtual solutions offer an approach to reduce the number of physical servers and manage the virtual servers as a pool of shared resources. It is not a-typical for a hypervisor virtualized environment to abstract multiple physical servers, create a virtual machine, and consolidate these virtual machines into a single physical server. It’s clear that this approach enables server consolidation and significant cost savings in the data center with rapid ROI. Production environments, however, have shied from implementing this approach as a way to consistently meet service levels.
Hypervisor style virtualization alone is not a panacea for utilization challenges. Real-Time Infrastructure (RTI) is a new class of software that dynamically allocates computing resources to enterprise applications based on business demands and policies. RTI software manages mission critical IT and business practices, and also provides dynamic activation of the necessary resources needed to meet service levels. As a leading vendor of Real-time Infrastructure, DataSynapse has proven products to enable organizations to do more with existing computing capacity, thus eliminating waste.
Having worked with Global 2000 type organizations around the world on data center consolidation and optimization initiatives, DataSynapse understands that business is dynamic and changes constantly. The creation of virtual machines does not necessarily help meet changes in demand. However the combination of DataSynapse FabricServer and hypervisor based virtualization enables customers to correctly size the virtual server resource pool and apply application activation in real-time, to meet the changing needs of the business. The flexibility to match compute resource to business user demand provides the scalability, throughput and metrics needed to consistently meet service levels and changing demand needs.
Customers of DataSynapse have publicly stated that GridServer and FabricServer implementations have dramatically impacted server growth rates and consistently driven up utilization rates in corporate data centers. The optimization derived by our customers has a direct impact on how many servers required to run there business today – which in turn has a direct impact on power consumption.
For those organizations that are trying to control energy costs, drive efficiencies in data center operations and lower the impact that there IT operations have on the environment should invest in solutions in a real-time infrastructure strategy.
[1] Source: IDC, Worldwide Server Power and Cooling Expense 2006–2010 Forecast, Doc #203598, September 2006
