Greening the Data Centre

A variety of factors are driving the emerging industry trend of ‘greening’ the data centre. A green data centre is one that is designed to be energy efficient and minimise its impact on the environment. One problem is that many financial services IT organisations have reached – or are approaching – the power and cooling capacity limits of their data centres. As a result, it is difficult to accommodate or expand the IT infrastructure. However, they still have to respond to continually increasing demands for business services that require more servers, more storage, and more network elements. Another concern is that energy costs are high and rising to the point where power and cooling now account for a significant portion of IT operations costs. In addition, organisations are coming under increasing pressure to become good corporate citizens by reducing their power consumption to conserve energy.

A major contributor to excessive power consumption in the data centre is ‘overprovisioning’. Organisations have created dedicated, siloed environments for individual application loads, resulting in extremely low utilisation rates. The result is that data centres are spending a lot of money powering and cooling many machines that individually aren’t doing much useful work. Some are even sitting idle.

Innovation

Processor vendors, hardware vendors, software vendors, and IT organisations are all working to address the problem. Processor vendors are developing more energy-efficient technologies, such as dual-core processors and CPUs that are automatically throttled based on workload. Hardware vendors are developing energy conservation technologies, such as energy-efficient fans. Software vendors are providing server and storage virtualisation technologies that enable IT to lower the number of physical devices that need to be powered and cooled. The primary approach that financial services IT organisations are taking to reduce power consumption in their data centres is to consolidate and virtualise their data centre environments.

Difficulties

This consolidation and virtualisation is a complicated undertaking that requires deploying not only the right number of physical devices, but also the right types of physical devices. Determining the right number of servers means including the correct number of physical servers and virtual servers that can be accommodated in each physical server host. What’s more, IT has to ensure that the resulting server configuration reduces power consumption and can handle current workloads at agreed-upon service levels and provide sufficient room for growth. Power consumption and cooling must be considered in consolidation and virtualisation. Newer processor chips consume more power and generate more heat than their predecessors. In addition, newer chips have lower maximum operating temperatures than their predecessors, so they may require more cooling.

Moreover, as a result of the higher power consumption and greater cooling requirements of the new processors, usable rack density (the number of servers a rack can accommodate) is decreasing. That places a limit on the number of new servers that a data centre can accommodate based on available rack space. It is important to note, however, that although the new servers consume more power, they can perform more useful work than their predecessors. So, when choosing servers, it’s essential to consider both performance characteristics and power and cooling requirements. It’s like choosing an automobile based not only on how fast it can go, but also on how many miles per gallon it can achieve.

Business benefits

The overriding business benefit of greening the data centre through consolidation and virtualisation is optimising power efficiency to gain maximum work output per watt consumed. This will help reduce operations costs. It will also permit organisations to continue to expand services to meet increasing business demands without requiring additional power and cooling, a benefit that is especially important to those organisations that have already reached the power and cooling limits of their data centres. BMC Software offers solutions that address these issues.

About BMC
Founded in 1980, BMC Software delivers the Business Service Management solutions IT needs to increase business value through better management of technology and IT processes. For more information, visit www.bmc.com/virtualization.

About Tom Bishop
He was named one of the top 25 CTOs by InfoWorld Magazine in 2004 and is a well-known industry innovator who holds nine patents in fault-tolerant computing and in leading the development of industry standards, such as the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) and POSIX.