Extending Green Initiatives with Virtual Desktops

By Paul Gaffney
published: Tuesday, September 30 2008

You have probably read a lot lately about the "green" benefits of server virtualization: lowering power use in the data center. IBM is even running a TV ad with trees and birds sprouting from a server rack.  It's a great environmental story, but it is just the beginning. As many enterprises are realizing, desktop PCs use a lot of energy. Some companies can't even plug in new PCs. Like Clark Griswold in Christmas Vacation, they've used up all the available electricity. You can start saving: by switching to virtual desktops, and specifically to server-hosted desktop virtualization using thin clients, you can deliver meaningful energy savings and make your enterprise more "green." (No promises about trees and birds sprouting from your new machines, however!)

Most people don't realize how much energy PCs consume.  A single PC uses up to 300 watts of power even when it is sitting around doing nothing. Also, most organizations replace PCs every three years, leading to environmental waste and high disposal costs.

With thin client-based, server-hosted virtual desktops, you can deliver the same rich Windows experience that users are accustomed to with traditional, energy-hungry fat PCs, while significantly reducing your environmental impact and realizing substantial savings:

• Thin clients have a much longer lifespan than PCs; they're typically used for five to seven years.  

• They require much less air conditioning because they run cooler. Most don't even need an internal fan.

• If you replace just 1,000 PCs with 1,000 thin clients, you'll get:

• 90 percent less energy usage

• 131,810 fewer kilowatts/hour used per year (each thin client uses approximately 6 watts/hour)

• Almost $12,000savings in annual energy costs

• Over 100 fewer tons of CO2 output

Since you are moving some computing from the desktop to the server, you may wonder if the desktop energy savings are off-set by the energy costs for additional servers in your data center. Even with the increased electricity servers and storage, you can still lower your energy costs by more than 60 percent. This can translate into tremendous savings for large enterprises.

Taking Green to the Next Level

If you want to reduce your environmental footprint and increase your savings even more, consider running your thin client-based virtual desktops as an outsourced service. In the desktops as a service (DaaS) model, your virtual desktops live on infrastructure owned, operated, and maintained by service providers. These large, asset-intensive facilities are already equipped with the required computing resources. You don't have to put additional servers in your own data center.  And you don't have to foot the bill-or burden your city's power grid-for increased data center usage.

While it may seem like doing this transfers the environmental impact and costs from the enterprise to the service provider, this doesn't have to be the case.  Many service providers are now powering their data centers with efficient, renewable energy from sources such as hydroelectric dams, and from facilities that use clean wood chips and fiber fuel instead of coal.  And many are continuing to enhance efficiencies through affiliations with organizations such as the Green Grid, a non-profit consortium dedicated to advancing energy efficiency in data centers and business computing ecosystems.

In addition, providers that offer virtual desktops as a service can base their solutions on multi-tenancy platforms, which enable them to host multiple VDI deployments on a single DaaS infrastructure.  This is much more efficient than, for instance, having 10 infrastructures, each of which supports one VDI deployment, and, of course, it results in lower energy consumption by the service provider.

By implementing thin client virtual desktops and choosing a DaaS service provider that is committed to renewable energy, you can achieve a win-win:  reducing your impact on the environment and substantially lowering your costs.

Desktone, IBM