Green Data Center: Technology Solutions

By Aditya Mhatre at 24 December, 2008, 6:42 am

This is part 2 of a 3-part series.

The Greening of IT can be looked at from two perspectives, technology oriented approaches and management or organizational approach. Let’s discuss the technology approach to begin with.

Technology Approaches:

Server Consolidation

A long standing myth in data centers has been that each application requires its own server for security and stability reasons. This assumption leads to costs like server acquisition, physical real estate occupied by the server, wiring requirements and many such costs. This also leads to low utilization of server capabilities. However, the recent advances in virtualization technologies negate the argument of application security and server stability. Research points to server utilization as low as 6%. Using virtualization, one can create several OS instances and cater to multiple applications on a single server. Server consolidation using virtualization technologies can ensure optimum utilization of server resources as well as reduced energy costs. Infact, the energy costs will result in dual cost reduction i.e. reduction in cost of running the server and reduction in energy cost in cooling the server. The annual cost to keep a server running is estimated to be around $300 to $600 and the cooling costs are estimated to be around the same which leads to $1200 saving per year per server. This does not include the cost saving of purchasing the hardware and the separate software licenses required.

Cooling systems

Cooling systems have also gone through huge change and can be an effective tool. There are several options to replace the room level cooling to much more targeted cooling systems. Sometimes such cooling systems are mounted in side the rack hence choosing and implementing the right cooling system could result in long term cost savings as well.

Printing regulations and enterprise wide desktop power management

Printing is one of those areas where the cost is increasing at a steady rate. Organizations can apply enterprise wide printing regulations on users based on their roles by restricting the number of prints on a monthly basis. These restrictions can be further extended by manager approvals if required.

The Advanced Configuration and Power Interface (ACPI), an open industry standard, allows an operating system to directly control the power saving aspects of its underlying hardware. This allows a system to automatically turn off components such as monitors and hard drives after set periods of inactivity. In addition, a system may hibernate, where most components (including the CPU and the system RAM) are turned off. An efficient desktop power management services have been known to have around $100 per user annually. Most fortune 500 companies have more than 10000 employees which could lead to saving of $1 million annually.

Read Part 1 : Green Data Center: Why is it Important?

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Categories : Technology