Green IT: the way forward

A new wave of technology solutions is emerging that offer greener, more energy efficient approaches to IT – and not before time. Over $4.5 billion was spent on electricity for US servers and data centers in 2006, while data centers alone contributed to 1.5 percent of total US electricity consumption that same year. So what are the key developments contributing to this more energy efficient approach to IT? Our experts explain.

PE. IT energy efficiency is now one of the top priorities for CIOs and data center managers. Has IT evolved to the point where it can consider energy efficiency without sacrificing uptime or performance?

JA. Absolutely. By automating IT processes, implementing best practices and providing consistent customer service levels, even while going green, you can still wake up an out-of-band PC or Laptop to perform software updates, patches, backups and more. What’s more, you can do it all remotely so you don’t need a truck roll just to fix a problem. All this reduces your carbon footprint while improving service levels.

RS. While energy conservation has become more important, IT is still fundamentally risk averse and in most cases not motivated by or accountable for energy costs. IT managers and executives rarely adopt technology that conserves energy but compromises availability or service levels. This is why many energy saving technologies are typically disabled by default by the hardware manufacturer or IT.

VMware virtualization offers dramatic energy savings while increasing availability and service levels. VMware virtualization enables companies to virtualize physical servers into virtual machines and consolidate them onto fewer servers. By consolidating 10 or more servers onto a single physical system, customers can reduce energy costs and consumption by more than 70-80 percent. The virtual machines can be centrally managed and controlled, and even moved across physical servers without any user impact or downtime. Extending this functionality, virtual machines are dynamically balanced across a pool of servers to ensure they get the physical compute resources they need. As a result, with VMware virtualization IT managers and executives save energy and at the same time have more flexible, available and responsive infrastructure.

LW. In this age of global warming, everyone is scrambling to reduce their carbon footprint and no company can ignore the need to be mindful of energy efficiency. Many companies’ data centers have actually reached the limits of their designed power capacity. In 2006, Gartner reported that 50 percent of data centers will have insufficient power and cooling capacity by 2008. The business choice facing such customers is to build additional data centers or make current ones more efficient. Energy reliability is just as critical, particularly when you consider that system failures can cost millions of dollars in lost business. But energy reliability is more a factor of good siting ¬– avoiding areas with great potential for power failures – and installing adequate power backup systems. I see synergy rather than conflict between energy efficiency and energy reliability. Energy efficiency can support reliability by helping reduce the amount of overall power that must be supported by the grid.

PE. A recent study by Lawrence Berkeley Labs suggested that data centers could account for as much as six percent of the entire US energy consumption. What are the challenges facing the industry in this regard?

RS. Demand for data centers will inevitably increase as information, commerce and seemingly everything else gets digitized. Fortunately as data center energy consumption becomes more visible, it attracts more industry and government attention, bringing innovation and requirements or incentives to increase efficiency. Today, data centers are hugely inefficient, so there is plenty of room for improvement.

One primary challenge for data center inefficiency on the IT side is the existing x86 server model of one operating system per server. This results in hardware that is typically idle 85-95 percent of the time but still consumes more than half the power of a normal workload. Another challenge is that many data centers were built 10-15 years ago and are not equipped for the power density of today’s IT equipment, which gets refreshed every few years. As a result, data centers are often half full of IT equipment but can’t accommodate more heat or power. Finally, the industry has the challenge of measuring exactly how energy efficient data centers really are or even knowing what is consuming the power.

VMware is helping to address these and other issues. Server virtualization is eliminating the excess capacity and waste that is rampant in the industry today, which IDC believes is a three-year supply of hardware. Our customers are often able to delay or eliminate huge investments in new data center space. We are also working to create standard ways of measuring energy efficiency through various industry organizations such as the Green Grid.

JA. Data centers are an important focal point for energy consumption. It’s more of the cooling factor impact on energy usage that needs to be addressed overall. We anticipate that relevant changes will be seen in the future moving more towards data center power management through the use of job schedulers and virtualization tools. But, beyond the data centers, billions of dollars and energy consumption is wasted by leaving laptops and desktops running 24/7 in order to manage and maintain their performance. By implementing best practices, utilizing out-of band management and enforcing energy efficient power policies, reducing the power-on requirements for the client side will contribute significantly to the cause.

LW. In general, power costs per watt are going to increase while the world moves to cleaner power sources because these sources are generally more expensive, at least until we get better at producing them. Thus any company would be wise to find ways to increase their energy efficiency to help hold down energy costs and ensure supply. This would also apply to any new data centers a company is considering building as well. It would obviously pay to be as green as possible in everything you select from servers and cooling technologies to power distribution and conversion to lighting. Security comes from making the right selection in every element of your design.

PE. Is this just about hardware? Or is there more that can be done by the software community in terms of contributing energy efficient solutions for the data center?

JA. Software plays a critical role in being energy efficient, enforcing policies and eliminating the CO2 an organization spews into the atmosphere. IT automation in itself fundamentally changes how IT services are delivered. Routine IT tasks are now performed remotely, reducing the travel time to client sites. This in turn reduces the overall carbon footprint. It may seem minimal to consider but when you imagine the overall worldwide impact on energy use, it’s huge. Couple this with the software tools to implement out-of band power management and the ability to implement power efficiency policies and the impact significantly increases.

RS. Software has received less attention than hardware but software will play a significant role in making data centers more energy efficient. We are just scratching the surface of its potential at this point. Ultimately, it is the intersection and integration of software and hardware that matters. VMware is in a unique position in this regard as it sits between the hardware and software stack on a physical server. This privileged position gives us a lot of visibility and control. We can monitor the resource consumption of software workloads and also directly manage the physical hardware resources across a farm of servers.

VMware software also encapsulates hardware into a software file, giving customers degrees of flexibility and mobility that physical machines lack. Perhaps this is best illustrated by distributed power management (DPM). DPM monitors utilization across a pool of servers and when there is excess capacity, it turns off unneeded servers. The software moves running virtual machines to other servers in the process, so there is no impact to end users. This shows how powerfully software can solve this problem but also highlights the importance of integration with the hardware.

PE. With the rising costs of energy worldwide, many companies are beginning to hold the CIO responsible for datacenter energy costs. How have you seen energy efficiency rise up the corporate agenda in recent years? Is enough being done, and what areas need to be addressed in order to ensure efficiency and energy reduction strategies remain top of mind?

LW. If I look at our own company, it’s obviously at the top. One major theme in Intel CEO Paul Otellini’s keynote at the Intel Developer Forum in September 2007 was energy-efficient computing – both in the data center and on the desktop. Our processor products demonstrate this top-level commitment. So do our industry efforts. Intel is on the board of The Green Grid, a global consortium dedicated to advancing energy efficiency in data centers. In 2007, Google and Intel, along with the EPA and a host of other organizations, formed the Climate Savers Computing Initiative. According to Intel SVP Pat Gelsinger, this initiative will, by 2010, cut greenhouse gas emissions in an amount equal to removing more than 11 million cars from the road or shutting down 20 500-megawatt coal-fired power plants. How do we keep energy efficiency top of mind? I think we need to get more companies involved in organizations like these.

JA. Businesses are continually looking for ways to cut costs and one of the first places they look is IT. IT can only be cut so many times before it starts affecting the success of business operations, so IT needs to look elsewhere. Power management is one place that needs to become more than just an IT concern – it needs to become an overall company concern and effort. Educating staff and enforcing power management policies on IT assets is the next place that organizations can focus.

RS. Energy efficiency is climbing the list of corporate priorities at the center of a perfect storm in the industry. Energy costs, data center density, and sustainability initiatives are all on the rise. Energy costs will soon exceed hardware acquisition costs. Data centers are running out of capacity, constraining new IT services and business growth. Environmental concerns are prompting regulatory activity and top-down corporate initiatives. Energy efficiency is a priority among customers at VMware, especially among those who face capacity constraints today or in the near future. Research shows that adoption of virtualization is increasingly driven by power management concerns.

This perfect storm is causing a lot of commotion as technology and data center facility and cooling vendors rally to make data centers more efficient. There has been progress, although the first step is often for companies to claim or sell greenness in existing products or operations without much supporting substance. However, as awareness of environmental issues increases, we believe there will be more innovation in order to make a bigger impact.

PE. How is your company working with utilities and others in the power and energy industry to develop technologies and standards aimed at reducing energy consumption and improving efficiency?

RS. We have worked closely with PG&E to introduce an incentive program for server virtualization through which customers can be paid up to half of their project costs or $4 million for consolidating servers. We have collaborated with other utilities as well. There are currently five utilities in California, Texas and Canada running programs and twenty other utilities are investigating similar programs. These programs that have strict verification requirements are great validation of virtualization’s impact on energy efficiency.

VMware virtualization directly reduces server power consumption but there is more opportunity to dynamically reduce power consumed to cool these servers. Servers and HVAC systems account for roughly 75 percent of energy consumed in the data center. Our central position in the technology stack and ability to migrate live workloads and power down unneeded physical servers gives VMware unique opportunities to partner across the industry.

We recognize that achieving energy efficiency will require collaboration and leadership across the industry. VMware was a founding member of the Green Grid, a consortium of over 100 companies dedicated to creating standards, metrics and best practices for energy efficiency in the data center.

JA. Through technology partnerships, Kaseya continues to provide integrated solutions based on industry standards and best practice policies. For example, Kaseya partners with Intel for power management solutions and Intel, in collaboration with private and government organizations, is helping to drive global standards, solutions and products that ensure the delivery of energy-efficient performance while reducing overall environmental impact.

LW. Energy-efficient solutions provide a positive impact to data center performance by enabling more to be done within the same power budget. When you consider the way data center power consumption has steadily risen, avoiding any increase in one’s current power budget yields a good-sized cost savings, and on a larger scale is a big contribution to slowing global warming. Purchasers of Intel processor-based servers have many ways to profit from our work, as Intel’s ‘tick-tock’ cadence continues to deliver new process technology with enhanced micro-architecture or entirely new micro-architecture every year. These innovations can result in major efficiency gains for constrained power envelopes.

Implementing energy efficiency

As the Director of Sustainable Computing at Sun Microsystems, Mark Monroe is responsible for driving Sun’s Green Data Center initiative. Here he provides his top tips for reducing IT energy consumption.

Computing is intimately linked to eco-business, both as part of the problem and part of the solution. Data centers account for 1.5 percent of the total electric consumption of the US, and that consumption is doubling every five years. And there is no reduction in the demand for computing, with new applications like YouTube and Salesforce.com, or web browsing from 300 million new cell phones each year.

But IT is also part of the solution. First, refresh old technology. New servers can reduce consumption by as much as 75 percent and can pay for themselves in less than three years time, and refreshes can often be done without software development resources. Second, eliminate unused servers. Studies by The Uptime Institute and data collected by Sun show that 5-20 percent of servers in data centers are completely unused, but are still using power and cooling resources. Turn suspect servers off and wait for someone to complain. Finally, raise the temperature. ASHRAE recommends set point temperatures as high as 77F, and each degree (F) the temperature is raised can save four percent of the facility’s cooling energy. Moving from 68F to 75F could save 20-30 percent of the cooling cost.

Most customers come at green business from the pragmatic side, so tangible benefits are key to adoption of almost any efficiency project. Frequently, a small change in strategy leads to realization of multiple benefits, both tangible and intangible. For example, an Open Work program like Sun’s, which allows employees to ‘connect to work’ instead of ‘go to work’, provides tangible benefits to the company of reduced real estate footprint, lower facilities capital and operating costs, and measurably higher employee satisfaction and retention. On the intangible side, employees get quality of life benefits, the commuting CO2 footprint of the company goes way down, and the company gets higher productivity from employees who work ‘casual overtime’ because it’s convenient. Eco-responsibility is frequently about finding those multiple benefits in opportunities.

About the contributors

As the EVP of Marketing for Kaseya, Jim Alves manages all corporate and product marketing, which includes the definition and development of channel programs. His understanding of the market is the foundation for his belief that building a strong channel is the key to a successful business.

Rob Smoot is Group Product Marketing Manager at VMware.

Lorie Wigle is the Director of Server Technology and Initiatives Marketing for Intel. She and her team are responsible for taking to market the Intel Virtualization Technology offerings, as well as Intel Active Management Technology and other advanced platform capabilities.