The Green Movement - Coming to a Data Center Near You By Joe Wagner published: Tuesday, May 22 2007
The public's (and IT's) consciousness has awoken to the need for environmental action. New virtualization technology can enhance your green efforts, but management of these technologies is essential for real success
IT and Society – The Mirror Effect
Whether we realize it or not, IT networks are intrinsically linked and mapped to larger movements within society. When the Internet began to change the way people communicate and conduct business, the network followed suit. Expansion to multiple servers was the norm in order to carry and house the increasing gigabytes of data created on a daily basis. The advent of the remote site reflected the trend toward a decentralized world, where workers migrated freely throughout the globe, and demanded the ability to take their work with them. The rise of laptops and mobile devices followed, further expanding the data center as users became dependent on the ability to be “always on” regardless of location.
With this “always on,” mobile world, society has become increasingly aware of the need for security and control of the access to information. The data center has mirrored this trend as well, bringing many of the servers that were spread through corporate outposts back under central control at the company headquarters. Although this move brought a sense of stability to the network, it demanded an ever-increasing expansion of the data center footprint. Data growth has continued unabated and the rapid deployment of new servers has been the easiest way to keep up with the pace of business. However, this strategy created ever-increasing cost, one that business is just starting to grapple with. It’s the soft cost of energy and resources.
IT is at another crossroads in relation to society’s norms. With the popularity of Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth and the environment becoming a early hot topic for the 2008 presidential contenders, the environmental movement has matured to a mass acceptance stage. No doubt you’ve seen the rash of covers on business publications illustrating the need for business to engage in the environmental discussion in a meaningful way. Once again, the consciousness of society is reflected in the operation of IT. Would you leave your car running in the garage overnight, eating up gallons upon gallons of gas and electricity? Of course not, since it would not only waste the precious dollars in your wallet, it would unnecessarily cause pollution. It’s coming to light that those noxious fumes emitted into the air and the cost to keep your vehicle running pale in comparison to what is needed to run your data center.
Data Centers – Resource Hogs?
Modern servers, in order to handle the sheer magnitude of today’s data, have grown larger, denser, hotter and take up much more power. IDC estimates that the total power and cooling bill for servers in the U.S. costs a whopping $14 billion a year, and if the current trends persist, the bill is going to rise to $50 billion by the end of the decade. It’s clear the data center is a major consumer of power, not to mention a major contributor to a company's energy bill.
Increasing energy efficiency in the data center is not only a necessary step toward becoming more environmentally sound, it’s a smart way to cut costs. Thankfully, technology has created an effective way to tackle this problem with virtualization – server consolidation and containment – that can help companies place multiple workloads on the same server, allowing for fewer physical servers and thus lowering the electricity and cooling requirements.
Virtualization – Back to the Future
Virtualization is not a new concept. Various techniques that mirror today’s virtualization technology were used throughout the 1960s and 1970s to boost performance for shared mainframe systems. Yet, many of these techniques were put aside in 1980s and 1990s, as microprocessors became ever more powerful and inexpensive and PC servers replaced mainframe and minicomputer systems. As it became practical and affordable to simply roll out a new server whenever IT needed, the virtualization concept was prematurely retired.
Moreover, as x86-based servers became the norm, departments and workgroups quickly became accustomed to "owning" their own servers. Whenever a new application needed deploying, an additional server request was obliged, no questions asked from the IT department. Adding servers became de-rigueur when addressing growth and change, and even today remains the IT manager’s default choice. An unfortunate byproduct of this approach was rampant sprawl, which has become progressively worse throughout the 1990s right up to the present day. The result: IDC found many enterprise servers operate as low as 15 percent capacity utilization while new server roll-outs continue, stuffing data centers to the rafters with power-hungry machines. The impact the financial, operational and environmental levels are real.
Costs for housing, powering, cooling and maintaining these servers are estimated to continually rise, creating a tremendous burden on resources. Consider the impact the California black-outs had on business, and the subsequent calls for either increased infrastructure or increased billing rates and rationing. None of the proposed solutions are the least beneficial, and all will create either higher bills or higher taxes for businesses to offset the infrastructure.
All the while, the need to drain more resources from the environment to power the utilities rises, and new infrastructure builds could take away precious available land. With this in mind, many enterprises today are considering moving to a usage-oriented computing model–that is, one where dynamic reassignment of computing resources matches changing demands while reducing financial and environmental impact. This model demands a holistic infrastructure approach, with coordinated technologies in both silicon and software that facilitate a dynamic match of resource supply with resource demand.
Virtualization is the keystone in this service-oriented dynamic computing model. Unlike the first-generation of virtualization that was confined to one “box” mainframes, today's server virtualization technologies promise to enable new levels of cost-efficiency and responsiveness across heterogeneous unique environments with unprecedented flexibility. This model reduces the server footprint, and when effectively utilized actually enables an enterprise to curb deployments while still growing their business. Yesterday’s dream of adaptive and responsive virtualization is today’s reality, with added environmental and cost benefits.
The Many Forms of Virtualization Green
Virtualization offers great promises: flexibility and cost efficiency, while reducing the corporate burden on the environment. It can be a key component to addressing the enterprise power consumption issue in the following ways:
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Rapid application validation and deployment
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Application portability
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Dynamic load balancing
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Failover with minimal service interruption
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Extended life for legacy operating systems and hardware
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Simplified physical infrastructure in a heterogeneous software environment
With new virtualization technologies rapidly emerging we’re seeing new industry organizations as well, such as The Green Grid, which are committed to making data center energy efficiency an industry standard. With the backing of these technology consortiums, clean virtualization strategies will create new usage models that can transform the entire IT organization.
"If It Sounds Too Good to be True…" - The Virtualization Management Pitfall
The case for virtualization has been made, however we’d be neglectful if we recommended running head-first into deploying a virtualization strategy without considering the impact on the organization. Unfortunately, the benefits of virtualization come hand in hand with more complex server management issues. In order to achieve the lower power consumption and cooling costs virtualization promises, one must also incorporate automated virtualization management.
Imagine assembling the world's best orchestra. You scour every continent for the best violinists and trumpet players, the most skilled drummers and harpists. But you fail to hire a conductor – let alone an experienced, advanced conductor—everyone is playing at once, the tempo is off, and no one knows when to begin the next movement. It’s hardly worth the time and effort to develop the orchestra in the first place.
The same holds true for virtualization. There is a whole set of new management challenges to consider. In the same sense that you reduce physical server sprawl, you can inadvertently created virtual server sprawl. Doing so likely means a whole host of unanticipated capacity and resource allocation issues. Understanding how to manage and allocate effectively is vital to optimizing your new arsenal of virtual machines, and this is where automation tools come in to play.
Let’s consider a common IT procedure, and how it might play out without automated virtualization management. IT regularly “brings down” a server for updating or servicing, easily accomplished manually in today’s data center. While an inconvenience, workers have come to expect and work around this procedure. With virtualization housing a number of tasks and applications on one server, many aspects of the business, not just isolated departments, are going to be affected by there power downs. And on the off chance you suffer a server failure, you risk taking huge portions of the business completely “off-line.”
It would take only one instance for executives to reverse their position on virtualization in their data centers in order to avoid these disastrous situations. Instead of reducing servers, you’ll likely need to create multiple fall back or mirrored sites to hedge your bets. Not only will you end up increasing hardware and power costs for new servers, you’ll eliminate any possible power and cooling reduction benefits.
Automated management can alleviate the heavy manual process of moving files and applications. Not only does this help avoid an offline situation, it enables effective server maintenance without risk. And if a physical server fails, there can be an automatic, rapid deployment of services for business continuity. You can plan maintenance schedules with confidence and reduced hassle, while keeping the business running smoothly. All the while you’re ensuring the cooling and power consumption savings and reducing the impact of your data center on the environment.
The Worldwide Call to Action
Virtualization is a technology that is coming to the forefront none too soon for business. At one of the largest meeting of world leaders, the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, the U.S. agreed to a binding treaty, later ratified by congress, which called for businesses to begin aggressively addressing their impact on the environment. Business has not yet had to answer to the existing administration in regards to these issues. However, with an impending election and the public’s consciousness focused on the environment, the next president is likely to take a more aggressive stance to enact the standards that are already law.
Many leading companies focus on reduction in power consumption as a key component in their green efforts. This in turn will make virtualization, and the ability it gives organizations to quickly reduce their environmental impact, even more attractive. And while virtualization can be a tremendous boost to an enterprise’s environmental policy, without the proper automated management tools in place, you will increase the likelihood of negative impact on the organization, threatening the very benefits sought in the first place.
Virtualization and its promises of reducing sever sprawl, heating and cooling costs, and power consumption are enticing, but they cannot be attained without effective management in place. With orchestrated management tools that automate critical data center processes, organizations can make virtualization a central component in their green strategy.
Joe Wagner serves as the General Manager of the Systems and Resource Management business unit at Novell. He is responsible for the development of comprehensive information technology management solutions across the technology stack including Novell's ZENworks suite of solutions. Mr. Wagner holds a B.S. in Chemical Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University and an M.B.A. from Boston University.
www.novell.com
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