Lowering Data Center Costs: Choose Your Server Components Wisely!
Organizations face significant financial challenges as data centers expand to meet rising business demands and energy costs increase. Some industry experts estimate that if server energy consumption is not curtailed, energy costs could surpass hardware acquisition costs. Supporting this, IDC believes that by 2010, the cost of energy could overtake the cost of hardware. Gartner has also noted that energy costs could soon represent more than half the cost of running a data center.
However, similar to installing a programmable thermostat, upgrading a furnace or weatherizing a home, organizations can invest in energy-efficient data center components to reduce consumption and, in turn, improve cost savings. In fact, many power-saving strategies available today can be implemented relatively cost effectively. A properly configured server can help an organization reduce its server acquisition and power consumption costs while improving asset utilization and total cost of ownership (TCO).
The Problem: Increasing Energy Consumption
Business demands have and will continue to push the processor performance envelope. With each successive generation, server processors are becoming more and more powerful. However, the increase in processing performance comes at a cost: greater energy consumption. For example, the annual cost to power a single 120-watt 3GHz dual core processor operating in an around-the-clock data center environment is estimated to be $137. At first glance, this figure may seem insignificant; however, when considered in context of a of a large data center environment with hundreds of processors, this figure can quickly become very significant to an organization's bottom line.
The Solution: Optimize Processor Efficiency
With ever-rising energy costs, shrinking IT budgets and increasing business demands, data center administrators have landed in the middle of a perfect storm. The traditional response to accommodate growth was purchasing more servers - unfortunately, this approach is no longer effective from a power management perspective and it can actually contribute to the problem.
A new approach is needed, where data center power and performance requirements are assessed jointly to yield server configurations that provide optimum performance without sacrificing energy efficiency. Configuring servers with energy-efficient components-such as Host Bus Adapters (HBAs) and Converged Network Adapters (CNAs)-help to free up server CPU resources and comprise one of the simplest methods of improving server performance and managing energy costs.
Today's Adapters and Improved Efficiency
Today, any server virtualization project should include adapter (HBA and CNA) virtualization - a technology that helps to reduce energy and management costs, while improving asset utilization and TCO. Fibre Channel-based Storage Area Networks (SANs) are deployed because of their performance, reliability and scalability. Fibre Channel HBAs, which provide connectivity for the SAN, are critical to its operation.
