According to VMware, going green is not just eco-friendly, it is best practice, and it can be achieved through virtualisation.

The financial costs associated with running a data centre have always been high on the IT agenda. However, particularly over the last twelve months, the environmental costs associated with these operations have also become a strategic business concern. Looking to the future, the cost of power and cooling are becoming a key part of data centre strategies for all companies, and the ‘Greener Computing’ movement is gathering momentum.

The reason power and cooling have become major issues is as a direct result of the increasing price of energy. Global warming and climate change have also moved up the social and political agenda, and consequently organisations have started to look at strategies for reducing their carbon footprints and taking a more ‘eco-friendly’ approach to business in general.

Information Technology is one of the fundamental tools that businesses rely upon in order to compete in the market, and increased reliance on IT has led to a rapid expansion in the physical size of data centres. The number of servers the average datacentre is required to support has also grown, but not necessarily efficiently. Though servers have become increasingly more powerful, delivering higher levels of performance, they also consume increasing amounts of energy. Modern servers have become the computing equivalent of gas-guzzling SUVs. According to IDC, a typical server ten years ago consumed 100W of power; the average machine today consumes four times as much.

In order to reduce costs, datacentres have also become much denser, increasing from an average of 7 servers per rack to 14. This has led to an overall increase in power consumption of about 15 per cent per year. All the electricity consumed by servers is transformed into heat, so in order to prevent data centres from turning into hot houses, energy consumption has to rise by an additional 25% to power cooling equipment.

Only a small proportion of these costs actually translate into business performance. Servers will use about 30 per cent of their peak electricity consumption while sitting idle. Considering that the average server remains idle for more than 80 per cent of the time it is actually running, the bulk of the power expended is effectively wasted.

Dealing with this problem has required a significant change in the way organisations think about managing their IT. Traditionally, the most common approach to rolling out applications to the business was to purchase a new, dedicated server to support each new piece of software; each physical server in the data centre would only run a single application. One technology that has allowed organisations to drastically rethink this approach is virtualisation.

Fewer machines
By using virtualisation, multiple applications can be run on a single physical server in the form of virtual machines, enabling organisations to greatly reduce the number of physical machines in the data centre and thus the overall power consumed.

The number of organisations embarking on server consolidation projects using virtualisation has grown hugely over the past twelve months. Typically, organisations implementing virtualisation see consolidation ratios of around 8:1. However, it is not uncommon for these ratios to climb to around 20:1 or even 30:1, particularly in larger enterprises. From an environmental perspective each server deployed as a virtual machine represents either a server which no longer has to be deployed, or a server which can be decommissioned or repurposed.

According to VMware’s own estimates, moving an application to a virtual machine can save, on average, over €189 per year in electricity operating costs, while savings in cooling costs can add up to an additional €237 – savings that accrue year after year.

Each virtual machine represents a certain amount of power that would otherwise have to be consumed: at today’s rates, about 8,000 kilowatt-hours. To put this into perspective, this is almost double the amount that an average household would use per year.

The second benefit of server virtualisation is that any energy consumed is utilised more efficiently. A typical server might be running at 400W supporting one application - not a very efficient ratio of work completed to power consumed. With ten physical servers running, the overall power budget would be 4000W. A virtualised server hosting ten applications at the same time would create a much better overall ratio, as each application could therefore be rated as using only 40W. The overall cost of running the datacentre is lower, and any cooling system costs are also reduced at the same time.

For some organisations, becoming more energy efficient and therefore ‘greener’ is simply one of the fringe benefits of implementing virtualisation. Virtualised infrastructures are significantly easier to manage and more flexible than their physical equivalents, and this makes the technology very compelling.

As the already significant momentum behind ‘Green Computing’ begins to grow, more and more organisations will start to see this as one of the primary drivers behind deploying virtualisation. VMware is looking at ways of furthering the green benefits of virtualisation by introducing intelligent load balancing to allow host machines to be switched off when utilisation rates fall – something called Distributed Power Management (DPM).

If businesses do not start voluntarily reducing their emissions, they may well be forced to by government regulations. The IT resources that companies rely on are responsible for about two percent of all global CO2 emissions, according to analyst firm Gartner – this is the same level as the airline industry, which is coming under increasing pressure for regulation imposed by governments.

Moving to sustainable energy supplies is one way to meet their own internal corporate social responsibility pressures, but the flipside of this is making the best use of any energy that is used.

Balancing ecology with economy through using virtualisation will provide organisations with significant savings over the longer term. Today being green is not just a matter of being eco-friendly but is simply best-practice and gives management teams who stay ahead in virtualisation, a real and sustained competitive edge.

Trustco is a VMware partner. Please contact us for advice and support in your virtualisation projects.