By Alex Bewley published: Thursday, September 25 2008
A month and a half ago I purchased an electric bike that resembles a scooter and have been riding it to work on a
regular basis. The speed is capped at 32km/h (about 20 miles per hour) and
electric bikes are part of a three year alternative transportation pilot
project by the Ministry of Transport in Ontario,
Canada.
Barring comments from peers about riding my electric razor, it takes me less
time to get into work on the e-bike than driving. I also realized that I don't
really need my SUV to cut through downtown traffic and travel a whopping 6.5km
(4 miles) to work. Rather than spending hundreds of dollars a month in gas, it
now costs me about $5/month in electricity to charge the bike. In discussions
with colleagues, they’re starting to question the feasibility using an e-bike.
I don't know how many will actually make the leap, but at least they’re
entertaining the idea of this alternative technology.
So, why I am telling you about my e-bike instead of server virtualization or
systems management? Well, the downsizing of the datacenter is also starting to
become front-of-mind for a larger group of IT staff (and the lines of business
that drive IT) as attitudes are changing and going "green" (or
lightening our eco-load) isn't perceived as a tree-hugging activity anymore.
It’s looked at as being both socially responsible and cost effective. That’s a
powerful catalyst.
As a typical software company, we had a number of older Sun servers (E4000's,
V220's), along with a host of other platforms we used for development. In our
city, newer building management firms have been installing electric meters on a
per-office basis and billing usage, changing power consumption from a blended
per square-floor cost to an additional monthly charge. So while the cost of
power consumption (and the corresponding air conditioning) might not have been
front of mind in the past, a change in the accountability for power usage has
made it a very legitimate business reality. Most people can't believe how much
juice a few hundred servers sucks up -- as food for thought, data centers
create almost 2% of global CO2 emissions.
Most firms are aggressively turning off the older servers and migrating to
newer platforms, especially virtualizing their x86 infrastructure using VMware.
The power consumption mindset has manifested itself in a different way in the telecommunications
world. The typical facilities manager at large Telco is normally responsible
for both the switches and the cost of the power consumed. As a result of this,
most vendors in the Telco space engineered their products to be low power
consuming. This is unlike regular IT, whereby the "business," which
is the prime buyer of technology to solve business problems, was divorced from
the cost of power to drive their computing platforms. Nortel has accidentally stumbled
on a green play in that most
of their technology was designed to be low power (from their Telecommunications
background). Talk about a killer app.
Back to consolidation. Most forward thinking software companies are taking
virtualization on VMware even further than simply consolidating physical
systems into virtualized ones. There is emerging technology to identify
workloads that can be offlined or VMotion'd to core servers during low-usage
periods and then subsequently idle the physical systems that previously contained
the instances. For example, in a typical development lab environment, QA and
Support require hundreds of instances for testing and simulating. When staff go
home at night, about 90% of these instances are not required. Wouldn’t it be
ideal to move the active 10% of workloads onto one or two physical systems and
then shut-down (or go into low-power mode) the rest of the physical
infrastructure? The system would then ‘power up’ first thing in the morning, as
the office comes back to life.
The long-term savings for power and HVAC, along with consolidating off-hour
workloads, is potentially huge and we are leveraging that at uptime software.
So, let's take a look at our carbon foot-prints and see what we can minimize,
both for our career advancement and our social responsibility. One word of
advice on the e-bike, buy a cool helmet.
Alex Bewley, CTO of uptime software, combines the unique skill set
of a deeply technical guru with the forward thinking business and strategy
savvy of a C-level executive. Alex has a B.Sc.H in Computer Science from
Queen’s University and over 14 years of technology and software experience with
companies like Sun Microsystems, AgPlan Limited, and uptime software. His
career has spanned roles from system administration to C-level to Visionary,
and he continually focuses on delivering a unique client experience for over
600 of up.time’s customers in 32 countries. Alex co-founded uptime software in
2000 and his passion in IT systems management is a driving force in keeping
up.time on the cutting edge.
