Going ‘Virtually’ Green
By Barbara DePompa, 1105 Government Information Group Custom Media.
Increasingly, federal audiences are beginning to show that they understand the transformational impact of virtualization on government IT operations, with benefits including consolidation, increased server and storage utilization and obvious space and energy savings, along with less demand for recycling or waste management.
Because standard servers today still run at less than 30% capacity, more federal organizations are turning to virtualization to reduce their server footprint, and increase the efficiency of federal IT operations. Because virtualization merges application workloads onto fewer servers and storage devices, reducing the number of servers to accommodate more work decreases the energy needed to operate servers and saves valuable floor space as well. Reducing the amount of equipment needed to run various applications also frees redundant servers for reuse or recycling.
From the green IT perspective, virtualization provides a range of benefits, including:
*Running multiple applications on the same server increases efficiency and reduces space requirements, allowing agencies to consume less energy and purchase fewer servers.
*Fewer servers also translates to lower demand for recycling or waste management.
*Thin clients used in virtualized environments, improves manageability, security and also reduces energy consumption by 25% or more. Other benefits of thin client computing include fewer points of failure, a longer lifecycle (up to seven years, compared with four years for fat computing clients) and a lower total cost of ownersh longer lifecycle (up to seven years, compared with four years for fat computing clients) and a lower total cost of ownership.
*The advent of cloud computing alters the way service providers offer infrastructure capability and provides software-as-a-service through standard, low-powered systems and optimized work flows in the data center. This advance, while still considered challenging from a security perspective, could significantly reduce an agency’s IT carbon footprint, along with the need for numerous redundant data centers.
According to recent research from IDC, Framingham, Mass., when combined with the quickly maturing x86 hypervisor technologies available from industry suppliers, “the synergy of blade architectures and virtualization offers customers the ability to dramatically increase utilization of their server investments, boost uptime, provide a more resilient and available infrastructure, and roll out new infrastructure and services more quickly.”
According to IDC’s report entitled, The Business Value of Virtualization: Realizing the Benefits of Integrated Solutions, by Al Gillen and Tim Grieser, the potential value of moving to virtualized computing realized the following significant savings:
*Adopting even just a basic level of virtualization in an IT infrastructure can result in a reduction of up to 35% of total annual server costs, per user compared with an un-virtualized x86 server configuration.
*The use of more advanced virtualization technology, along with sophisticated systems management tools that manage both guest environments and the virtualization engines, can significantly extend those benefits.
*An advanced virtualization infrastructure, in which more the 25% of servers are virtualized, can deliver a total reduction exceeding 50% per user, per year.
By adopting advanced virtualization into their IT infrastructures, federal organizations will gain better server utilization and reductions in acquisition, deployment, and power and cooling costs. At the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), for example, server sprawl was reduced by implementing rack-dense blade servers and virtualization software to better manage and allocate server resources. Storage area networks (SANs) improved storage management and higher density tape backup subsystems and new fans were also installed to lower energy costs and save space within the EPA’s data center infrastructure.
Meanwhile, the EPA has reported that data centers consume more than 60 billion kilowatt hours of energy, or about 1.5 percent of total U.S. electricity consumption. The EPA also predicts data center power consumption with no additional efficiency gains will nearly double from current rates, and the collective power bill will grow to $7.4 billion in 2011.