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IBM enables its mainframe customers to monitor and understand their data
center systems energy consumption in real-time. IBM takes a holistic view
of the energy envelope, considering power for operating the computers and
cooling the data center. Photo courtesy of greentechnology.com. |
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Serving
Up Savings: New Green IT Solutions
by Barbara Crane
Schools, government agencies and businesses may be overlooking a critical
piece in their quest to become more energy efficient. Personal computers,
laptops and the servers that support them are energy hogs.
Greening these tools along with facilities can save hundreds of thousands
of kilowatt hours. The savings often come from using technologies that are
available but often not used to their full potential.
One strategy calls for utilizing a technology known as "virtualization"
to reduce the size of the server room. "It's not uncommon to have 40 or
more servers in a community college's server room, running
twenty-four-seven," says Patrick Ciccarelli, president and chief executive
officer of
Varsity Technologies,
a consulting group that specializes in IT solutions for schools, colleges
and universities. "The servers, themselves, use large amounts of energy,
while a dedicated air conditioning system consumes enormous amounts of
additional power to cool the server room or data center. The number of
physical servers is justifiable, and considered best practice, on the
chance that if one application fails, it won't impact applications running
on other servers."
Virtualization, however, allows a physical server to run more than one
operating system at a time, decreasing the number of servers needed and
with that, the amount of energy used in running the servers and cooling
the room. E-waste is also slashed, because having fewer servers means
fewer will have to be replaced and recycled in the future.
While virtualization is a viable option for most servers sold today, few
IT departments are seeing its potential, because they lack knowledge on
how to migrate from their current infrastructure to a virtualized
environment. "We'll go into a server room and see a recently purchased
$4,000 server," Ciccarelli says. "That's a pretty powerful piece of
equipment. How much of the server's resources are being used? Sometimes as
little as five percent. They've bought all this processing power they're
not even using." In the past 18 months, prices of servers capable of using
virtualization technology have come down, making the virtualization
solution affordable even in a small environment, he says.
Virtual desktops and
thin client computing also increase IT efficiency and
save energy in various ways. Virtual desktops put all the desktop
applications that run on a PC onto the servers. The benefits: The IT
department can update an application once, instead of visiting each PC.
Fewer local computer resources are needed, extending the life of the
desktop, and in turn reducing e-waste.
A logical progression from virtual desktops is thin client computing,
where all significant processing also occurs on the server. Desktop
computers are replaced with thin client computers that are at least 50
percent smaller and cost 60 to 70 percent less than the standard desktop.
"This is the big win," Ciccarelli says. "In those locations where you have
desktop users who don't need consumer or multimedia applications, like in
the registrar or admissions offices, thin client computers do the job and
use 85 percent less power than a desktop."
Making green IT decisions should come early in the school construction
planning process, he says. Using the full scope of efficiencies made
possible by current computer and server technology, you can reduce the
size of the server room, the amount of energy used to power the equipment
and the amount of air conditioning required. And what about using laptops
and wireless networks? Wireless networks require less cabling, and laptops
use about 65 percent less energy than even a small desktop.
IT efficiencies like virtualization have been made possible largely by
advances in semiconductor technology. Over the last two decades,
Intel,
the world's largest semiconductor manufacturer, has greened its corporate
values, products and manufacturing facilities.
In 1999, in an effort to reduce global warming, Intel joined other members
of the
World Semiconductor Council to set emission
reduction targets. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) named Intel
the
largest green power purchaser
in the United States. The company partners with providers that supply
wind, solar and other forms of alternative energy. Intel has also begun to
build all its buildings and facilities to the U.S. Green Building
Council's Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED)
specifications and installs energy efficient features even in the
facilities it leases. Intel's products are becoming greener, too-lead-free
and soon halogen-free.
In addition to these efforts, Intel is enabling customers to be greener,
says Bill Davidson, an Intel marketing manager. For example, the
multi-core processor,
an Intel innovation, allows a single processor to do the work that several
processors did a few years ago. Multi-core processors are one way to
deliver much greater performance without additional computers, Davidson
says. Performance is also enhanced by a design breakthrough that Intel
calls, "hurry up and get idle."
Davidson compares the automobile to a computer to explain the concept. "In
a car, you're using fuel inefficiently if you race from one stoplight to
the next and idle at each one. The opposite is true for computers. When
you give the computer a task, like putting together a spreadsheet, the
faster the processor does the series of tasks and returns to idle, the
more efficiently it is operating." The take-home message: Purchase the
most powerful computer or server you can afford and use all its
capabilities to provide the greatest efficiency and use less energy.
The company has also reduced the power requirement on every laptop and
desktop by as much as 60 percent over the last few years. "As you increase
performance, you lower your power requirements," Davidson says. "In a
server farm environment, every watt you can take out of the environment
saves energy you need to power the servers and cool the room."
Green solutions are also being seen in the data storage side of IT.
According to a 2007 EPA
report
on server and data center energy efficiency, the energy consumed by U.S.
data centers will grow from 1.5 percent to 2.5 percent of the nation's
total energy consumption over the next five years. Systems and
technologies are currently available that can slow the growth, says Robert
Petrocelli, founder and chief technology officer of
greenBytes, Inc.,
an IT company that devises green solutions to data storage. "We can reduce
power and cooling required for data storage by nearly 80 percent,"
Petrocelli says.
He cites an example of a college or university in which students and
faculty store research and information online and where students share
files rich with images and sound. The result is duplication of the same
large files-over and over and over again, which the server then has to
store. greenBytes has developed a method for real time de-duplication,
that is, preventing a file from duplicating itself in real time, enabling
servers and computers to run more efficiently and use less energy. "Plus
you're saving a tremendous amount of prime real estate in the data
center," Petrocelli says, "because when you improve the storage density,
you're able to use much less space for data storage.
"We're getting to a point where we really have to extract efficiencies.
The good news is that there's lots of opportunity to do so."
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Green Server Farm
for Saddleback
Saddleback Valley Unified School District in
south Orange County, California, is home to 33,000 students and 3,500
staff. According to Michael Morrison, SVU's director of technology
services, the district needed to replace its aging server farm as part of
an extensive energy efficiency program, and it had to do it under severe
budget constraints. According to Dell Computers, which helped the district
"virtualize" its old servers and provided a centralized backup storage for
the virtual machines, the district has enjoyed some real benefits. These
include a $6,000 rebate from Southern California Edison for energy
efficiency and a savings of approximately $11,325 annually in power and
cooling costs. In addition, the district is saving $150,000 a year in
physical server costs over three years.
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