Going Green

Aberdeen Group’s Jeffrey Hill explains how green initiatives are lowering costs and increasing efficiencies in the data center.

“It is estimated that only 40 percent of the power coming into the datacenter actually gets used by servers”
-Jeffrey Hill, Aberdeen Group

One of the most compelling aspects about going green for many companies is that the kinds of activities that support sustainability also support increasing efficiency, using resources and lowering overall infrastructure costs. This fortunate coincidence of objectives makes introducing greener concepts into an organization much easier, even for people who are doubtful about the substantive benefits of going green. For example, recycling has tangible benefits beyond helping to decrease the amount of plastic and glass plowed under in landfills. I visited a foundry that machined brass and copper fittings in the early 1970’s and was amazed how much usable material was reclaimed on the foundry floor. Back then the primary aim was to reuse costly materials in the manufacturing process; now the primary might be to reuse materials and meet corporate or stakeholder expectations for being green. Both goals nicely coincide with saving money.

This fortunate coincidence of green goals is highly apparent in IT organizations and data centers around the world. Consolidation of applications and servers through virtualization is an inherently green thing to do because fewer servers means lower power consumption and lower requirements for cooling, but it is also the right thing to do for cost and management reasons. Server virtualization is also about increasing overall infrastructure efficiency, and perhaps even more importantly, server utilization. Servers are frequently over-provisioned to support applications (for example, database) that are transactional in nature – lots of record writing and reading requires a robust server and fast storage to maintain acceptable performance. As a result, storage capacity often becomes underutilized, the opposite of what we would wish for in an efficient infrastructure model.

So, consolidation of applications on virtual servers is a good way to break the IT practice of ‘one application per server’ and thus increase overall utilization. Thin provisioning of storage, in which allocation of storage is controlled by a software storage manager so that applications are dynamically allocated storage capacity on the basis of need is another way to increase capacity utilization and infrastructure utilization. Using storage tiers is another way to increase utilization. In fact, one of the reasons IT organizations implement Information Lifecycle Management policies is to codify the movement from one storage tier to another. Once transactional data has lost its currency, the data needs to be moved to lower cost, lower-performance storage. In an ideal world, we would have a good understanding of what data needs to be retained, say for regulatory purposes, and for how long. Such knowledge would make buying storage more predictable, but the current flood of information generated by knowledge workers in organizations of every size makes it unlikely that companies will stop or even slow adding capacity.

Even though the data center is a conspicuous consumer of power and cooling, most IT departments don’t see the utility bill – often that bill goes to another part of the organization. This practice is changing however, as better methods of monitoring consumption by servers and storage become available. It is estimated that only 40 percent of the power coming into the data center actually gets used by servers, but rising energy prices and the threat of global recession is forcing companies to take another look at consumption throughout the organization. Efficient use of the infrastructure not only helps control costs, it also increases manageability.

Organizations don’t start out being efficient; it takes a commitment at all levels of the organization to work towards efficiency. As with a green initiative, the company needs to implement a purposeful strategy of increasing utilization of existing resources. IT organizations need to incorporate the company’s strategic initiatives and goals into their infrastructure planning, acquisition, and retirement activities. In this way, IT not only makes a substantial contribution to the company’s green initiatives, it also enjoys the resulting efficiency and cost savings.