Virtualization Puts the Green Into IT Initiatives and Back Into Your Pockets

For many companies looking to implement green IT initiatives, virtualization for server consolidation presents a very appealing value proposition.  However, this view is a bit short-sighted and does not take into consideration all the savings and conservation aspects that virtualization can bring to the table.    Undoubtedly, server consolidation should be considered a cornerstone of any green IT initiative. Companies commonly attain consolidation ratios of 20:1 by virtualizing servers, and therefore can reduce power use by similar levels.  And that's a very good start to making IT operations greener. But virtualization technology also provides opportunities for companies to make their server operations much more efficient all the way around and gain additional benefits to conserve resources, save energy and make fewer systems do so much more.

Here are three potentially overlooked ways companies can use virtualization to enhance their green IT efforts:

1.        Tighten up the virtual machines. While 20:1 server consolidation ratios are common, some organizations reach 40:1 or even higher. When you consider the low end, a 20:1 consolidation ratio means that now one server does the work previously done by 20. The organization no longer has to power, cool and maintain 19 servers, which represents a 95 percent reduction.    You can potentially hit the high end of consolidation by making virtual machines as compact as possible, which lets more of them share a single virtual host.   New solutions can automatically shrink the size of virtual machines, using techniques such as de-duplication, compression, realignment and defragmentation.  Imagine the power of being able to resize specific virtual machine and reclaim storage based on what it needs to do now - not based on specs from when it was built.   With reductions of VMs ranging from 30 to as high as 80 percent of their original size, anyone can see the potential impact for conserving storage resources.    The ability to resize VMs not only enables more VMs to share a single host, but also reduces the IT assets and energy required to backup, store and transfer virtual images.   When you consider that IT equipment accounts for approximately nine percent of all energy consumed by businesses, and data centers use up to 1,000 times more power than equivalent office space, the potential savings here is something that every organization needs to reckon with. Servers alone account for 0.6 percent of all power consumed in the U.S. (1.2 percent if power for cooling systems is included), according to a 2007 study by Stanford University researchers.