|
Page 1 of 3 Is Green Worth the Greenbacks? By Gail Dutton published: Thursday, September 11 2008
Energy has taken center stage in this year's U.S. Presidential election and, as winter approaches, nations around the globe are keenly aware that the warmth of their hearths has as much to do with decisions made in Asia and the Middle East as with their own resources. Meanwhile, data centers' energy usage continues to climb, leading to predictions of dire capacity shortages within the next few years. Against that backdrop, it's no wonder that data centers are paying particular attention to green alternatives.
Beyond the perceptions of an impending shortage of available power, there's also the sense that going green is the right thing to do. A survey of the approximately 100 attendees at the August MIT Sloan CIO Symposium revealed that 90 percent believed that green data centers would be crucial to meeting their companies' business objectives in 2009. More than half said that going green would give their firms a competitive advantage. That advantage, according to Patrick Guay, executive vp and general manager of Voltaire, comes not just in public relations, "but in actual, tangible benefits that increase efficiency, lower costs and allow companies to invest in strategies that create further advantages."
As IBM found when building its own green data center, "each dollar of energy savings drives $6 to $8 dollars in operations savings," Peter McCaffrey, director of enterprise systems at IBM stresses. Benefits accrue in terms of increased productivity, decreased floor space requirements, decreased maintenance costs and other examples.
Reducing power consumption is the name of the game, "but there's no huge ‘aha!" moment," Matt Calhoon, chief technology officer at i/o Data Center says. There is, however, a lot of confusion. "There's no charge back to IT for power, so CIOs don't know where to start," points out Nate Ulery, director of the infrastructure solutions practice at West Monroe Partners. His colleague, manager Scott Klein, recommends first determining where you want to be and only then looking at the technology to get you there.
Servers
Processors, server power supplies, storage, and communications equipment account for 52 percent of the power usage in data centers, according to Jack Pouchet, director of energy initiatives for Emerson Network Power. "Look at the existing data center," he says, to determine what is there, how it's being used and whether it's being properly maintained. Well-maintained, tightly connected equipment is less likely to leak power, he explains.
Equipment older than three years old, probably isn't as energy efficient as newer models. Replacing equipment just for the sake of energy efficiency doesn't make sense, but when it's time for a refresh, energy efficiency should be considered alongside functional requirement. Although return on investment varies regionally according to the cost of power, a hardware refresh in a region with electricity at 8 to 10 cents per kilowatt hour could see payback in about six to nine months, Pouchet estimates. Work by Emerson Network Power shows that one watt saved at the processor results in a total savings of 2.84 watts for the facility because of the savings that accrue in related areas, like cooling, UPS system power, power distribution and transformation from DC to AC power.
"Virtualization is a key concept in green IT," Ulery underscores. Server virtualization alone can result in 14 percent energy savings, according to Pouchet. Achieving such savings, though, involves actually unplugging unused servers. It's not unusual for replaced servers t continue running simply because it was nobody's job to unplug them. "If a server is running at or near zero percent utilization for 30 days, unplug it," Pouchet advises. "Don't even ask whose server it is. They're not using it."
Aside from the obvious energy savings, virtualization has some compelling business opportunities, according to Patrick Gray, president, Prevoyance Group. Cloud computing, one step beyond virtualization, has the added benefit of even easier provisioning and the ability to create new environments without many of the technical concerns that ensue when the servers - even virtualized ones - are under your own roof.
In that same vein, Pouchet insists that IT should own the all the servers and host the applications. Otherwise, IT is in the untenable position of having responsibility without authority. Owning the hardware - having both responsibility and authority over its resources - allows IT to optimize their utilization, and charge back the costs to the business units based upon their use of those resources.
Adapter cards are an often overlooked opportunity for power savings, Guay says. Typically, each server requires an Ethernet or fiber channel adapter card, Guay explains. Because Voltaire's energy-efficient unified fabric cards can transmit 20 GB per second versus the 1GB per second typically of Ethernet adapter cards, data centers can use fewer cards and fewer network switch ports, thereby decreasing the power used by this technology by about 90 percent. Designed initially for high powered government and scientific computing, these switches and the grids they serve are being integrated into the corporate market. Voltaire's unified fabric cards saved a Fortune 500 company with five data centers and 3,000 servers per data center totaled $ 7.4 million annually, according to Voltaire's data.
|
