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| Datatrend Newsletter: Q3 2008 |
President's Perspective
This edition of TrendSetter is dedicated to the increasing attention and industry focus around the greening of the data center. Recent studies have presented some surprising statistics with respect to the degree of power consumption and carbon output the IT industry is generating.
[ read more ]
Compelling Reasons to Support Green IT
Datacenters in 2006 consumed twice as much electricity as they did in 2000 -- 61 billion kilowatt hours at a cost of $4.5 billion, according to the U.S. EPA. According to a November 2007 IBM study, IT is the largest source of energy costs for many companies, often accounting for 30 to 40% of the entire energy budget.
[ read more ]
Going Green: Good for the planet and your bottom line
Wanted: IT department to help save the planet from climatic peril. Must be open minded, socially responsible and conscientious. Benefits include lower energy bills and less dependency on expensive infrastructure upgrades.
[ read more ]
Three basic steps to a greener data center
Kermit the Frog had it wrong. It is easy being green, if you know what steps to take. While experts may differ on the number and specific types of steps to undertake, we find that the best approach in the beginning is to keep it simple.
[ read more ]
IT Optimization: Think of it as your blueprint for green
For many organizations, the road to green starts with a formal assessment of their datacenter.
[ read more ]
Tech Tip: VMware Consolidated Backup (VCB) and File level backups for Windows OS Images
(The following Tech Tip is intended for those current users of VMware) VMware Consolidated Backup (VCB) is not a backup utility. It does not provide file or data backups, archive or retrieval functions. VCB is a command line driven framework which allows other backup tools, to access virtual machine data over the SAN. It allows users to further "consolidate" the backup workload.
[ read more ]
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President's Perspective
This edition of TrendSetter is dedicated to the increasing attention and industry focus around the greening of the data center. Recent studies have presented some surprising statistics with respect to the degree of power consumption and carbon output the IT industry is generating. With the rising cost of energy and environmental awareness being more acute, many companies are becoming increasingly motivated to address the issue. Yet, there also is some concern about IT industry (vendor) spin whereby some may wonder what is the best approach to realizing the true benefits and where project funding realities have to be dealt with as well. While it is clear that consolidation, when planned out and implemented correctly, will yield reduction in server foot print, power consumption and other benefits, not all will be able to justify more than a few basic first steps in moving towards the ideal goal of outstanding optimization.
Accordingly, in this issue, we set forth some guidelines that suggest a stair step migration from basic but effective action plans, to a more sophisticated realm of "greening" sophistication. There are some initial steps organizations can take around process discipline, habit modification and education......initial steps that will make a material difference with minimal investment. From there, short term investment may ramp up in the quest for bigger, long-term payoffs leveraging professional organizations to assist in migrating to more green solution architectures and systems management approaches.
I hope you enjoy this issue of TrendSetter and find the collective information to be useful and inclusive of pragmatic suggestions that can be easily acted upon, at least as it relates to realizing benefits quickly and with minimal and/or justifiable short term investment. If you have any questions, please contact my office anytime.
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Compelling Reasons to Support Green IT
- Datacenters in 2006 consumed twice as much electricity as they did in 2000 -- 61 billion kilowatt hours at a cost of $4.5 billion, according to the U.S. EPA.
- According to a November 2007 IBM study, IT is the largest source of energy costs for many companies, often accounting for 30% to 40% of their entire energy budget.
- Approximately 39% of IT CO2 emissions come from PCs and monitors, and 23% via servers and cooling, according to Gartner Group research.
- For every dollar spent on hardware, it costs approximately 50 cents worth of energy to run it, according to Gartner Group research. At this rate, energy costs are expected to increase to 71 cents for every dollar spent on hardware.
- 38% of the respondents to an October 2007 Forrester survey of enterprise IT professionals in North America and Europe report using environmental-impact criteria when evaluating IT products, up from 25 percent reported in an April 2007 survey.
- If current trends continue, the cost to power and cool servers could equal new server acquisition costs within a few years, according to an IDC report, "Worldwide Server Power and Cooling Expense 2006-2010."
- The typical datacenter consumes 10 to 100 times more energy per square foot than the average office building, according to the U.S. Department of Energy.
- The average desktop PC wastes nearly half of the energy it consumes as heat, which translates to higher electricity bills and increased greenhouse gas emissions, according to the Climate Savers Smart Computing Initiative.
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Going Green: Good for the planet and your bottom line
Wanted: IT department to help save the planet from climatic peril. Must be open minded, socially responsible and conscientious. Benefits include lower energy bills and less dependency on expensive infrastructure upgrades.
IT departments everywhere are being asked to take on that job -- the job of getting to "green."
Unless you've just woke up from a decades-long sleep in an Austin Power's-style cryogenic chamber, you already have some level of awareness of IT's impact on the environment.
According to the Gartner Group, power hungry servers, PCs, monitors, printers and other IT assets are matching the billions of tons of CO2 emissions created by the airline industry worldwide.
And it could get worse. The exploding global demand for technology services and processing power means greater power and cooling requirements. With the media and government attention on the industry's widening carbon footprint, the pressure is on IT to get green.
Oh, and if that wasn't enough stress, how about those sharply rising power costs?
If you step back from the headlines and take a closer look at what going green really means, there's good news for every IT organization.
Because when you boil it all down, going green really means using our IT assets smarter and more efficiently. So, while we work toward lessening our environmental impact, we'll also be saving the other kind of green---cold hard cash.
Green IT is more than the latest fad. It is a call to action for solving two of the most significant challenges facing us today: protecting the viability of our planet and surviving economic change fueled by skyrocketing energy costs.
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Three basic steps to a greener data center
Kermit the Frog had it wrong.
It is easy being green, if you know what steps to take. While experts may differ on the number and specific types of steps to undertake, we find that the best approach in the beginning is to keep it simple.
Step One: Measure your power consumption and set goals
The first step in managing change is taking measurement of where you are now. Look at your monthly energy costs over the last year. How much energy are you using? Most power bills provide electric usage graphs so you can see how much power your organization has been using, month by month, for the past two years.
Another tip: if you haven't already, it is a good idea to have your data center manager review a copy of your monthly electric bill.
Step Two: Conserve Power
You can start cutting back on your power requirements immediately by taking these three steps:
- Turn on power management. Many of today's micro processing chips have power management features that can provide power savings in the neighborhood of 20 percent or more.
- Turn off unused servers and other equipment after hours.
- Move to more efficient power supplies. Most power supplies provided by server manufacturers are inefficient, with many wasting up to half of the energy before the power gets to the server. To make matters worse, every watt of energy wasted requires another watt of cooling power to eliminate the excess heat from the data center. Ask your IT provider for recommendations for efficient power suppliers.
- Stop over provisioning. Ninety percent of data center resources are sitting idle waiting for usage spikes. Because applications are tightly coupled to the machines on which they run, dedicated hardware must be set aside each time a new application is put into production. Over-provisioning translates into millions of dollars of unused assets. The only way out of these problems is to create a more dynamic, real-time IT infrastructure-one that allows resources to be quickly repurposed to the most critical tasks and applications. And, one that's not labor-intensive, so savings from consolidation aren't off set by increasing operational costs.
Step Three: Decide on a Solution
A number of studies point to server utilization rates of between 10% and 15%. Consolidate workloads onto fewer servers and remove the energy sapping servers from your data center. Experts estimate up to $1,200 in energy saving per year for each eliminated server.
Once you have cut out the server dead weight, you can increase utilization rates on your remaining servers by moving server-based applications onto virtual machines, otherwise known as virtualization.
You should also consider upgrading to energy efficient servers, such as the IBM POWER6. The POWER6 chip allows you to consolidate severs and handle substantially larger workloads while using the same amount of electricity as its predecessor, for power and cooling.
More than a project or initiative, going green is a mind set and a process to be managed. It is important to get your employees on board by having them participate in setting goals, practicing green behaviors and sharing in the rewards of being a responsible corporate citizen and an efficiently-run organization.
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IT Optimization: Think of it as your blueprint for green
For many organizations, the road to green starts with a formal assessment of their datacenter.
Running greener means running more efficiently. With a formal, professional assessment, you can determine what specific obstacles are in the way of cutting your power and cooling costs and reducing your IT organizations carbon footprint, such as
- Too many servers
- Under-utilized processors
- Unnecessarily high power and cooling costs
- Unnecessary services running on servers
- Unnecessary application software
- Unacceptably low storage utilization
An IT optimization assessment can help you determine if server optimization or a more comprehensive data center optimization is right for you.
Two key IT Optimization strategies include:
Virtualization
Virtualizing an infrastructure can take on many forms, including server virtualization, storage virtualization and desktop virtualization. It is a consolidation strategy that takes many servers, storage units or desktops and consolidates them onto fewer physical devices. Virtualization simplifies and optimizes an organization's IT infrastructure to achieve cost savings and efficiency gains that result in bottom-line benefits. Less hardware = less power = less power and cooling costs.
If you are interested in learning more about Virtualization or how to get the most out of your current Virtualized Data Center, join us on Wednesday, August 6th at 11:00 am CST for a special Virtualization Webinar.
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IT Consolidation
IT consolidation refers to server consolidation and/or storage consolidation, or simply server containment. More and more companies are recognizing the need for IT consolidation due to the proliferation of servers and storage devices, the associated increases in system support costs, including power and cooling.
A full assessment will also provide you with other important information on your data center that can help you streamline administration, cut costs and operate more efficiently. To learn more about Datatrend's approach to IT Optimization, please click here.
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Tech Tip: VMware Consolidated Backup (VCB) and File level backups for Windows OS Images |
(The following Tech Tip is intended for those current users of VMware)
ABOUT VCB
VMware Consolidated Backup (VCB) is not a backup utility. It does not provide file or data backups, archive or retrieval functions.
VCB is a command line driven framework which allows other backup tools, to access virtual machine data over the SAN. It allows users to further "consolidate" the backup workload.
Traditionally, backup applications or tools have required a 'backup agent' to be purchased and installed on each operating system image (Virtual or Physical).
VCB provides the means to build a VCB Proxy server. Once built, VMDK files, (or Virtual Machine Disk files), from other VMware OS images can then be mounted on the Proxy Server in read-only mode, and then backed up.
RUNNING VCB
- VCB can be run either as a script or scheduled task. Execution occurs from the command line on the VCB Proxy Server.
- A snapshot file is created and added to the existing virtual machines VMDK file.
- Users have the ability to provide file integrity using the VMware data consistency driver, which freezes a virtual machines I/O. The consistency driver resumes I/O operations for the virtual machine once the snapshot file has been added to the VMDK file.
- Users can customize "Pre Freeze" files through the use of a script executed from C:\Windows\pre-freeze-script.bat file. "Post Thaw" custom scripts need to be executed from the C:\Windows\post-thaw-script.bat file.
- VMDK file(s) are then mounted on the VCB Proxy server as directories. (Read-Only).
- The File-Level backup agent backs up the files contained in the VMware VMDK file(s), using the existing backup tools and procedures.
- A VCB CLI unmount command is executed following completion of the File-Level backup, (this command can be scripted), the snapshot file is released to the primary VMDK and normal virtual machine operations resume.
Reasons for incorporating VCB as part of the File-Level Backup Strategy
- Consolidate the number of backup agents needed (significant potential cost savings)
- Eliminate CPU overhead on each individual OS image used for backup processing, further maximizing system resources.
- Utilize existing SAN resources for backup processes, freeing up network bandwidth previously used for backups.
* It should be noted, VCB is only supported for Windows virtual partitions. There is no Linux partition support at this time.
Debi Riedel is the Director of Technology Resources for Datatrend, and she is ready and willing to answer any questions you may have concerning this Tech Tip. You can reach Debi at 952-931-1203 or 800-367-7472, or you can email her at debi.riedel@datatrend.com.
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