A Green Budget Line - Forbes.com
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A Green Budget Line
Bob Worrall 07.28.08, 6:00 AM ET
While the headlines are focused on nearly $5 gas and its impact on consumers, skyrocketing energy prices also are biting into information technology organizations as the costs of powering and cooling data centers reach all-time highs. In many companies, the cost to run data centers is now the second-largest expense after people. And the cost of powering data centers worldwide could grow from $18.5 billion in 2005 to $250 billion by 2012. There is no better time than right now to focus investment on more energy-efficient data centers.
Making the data center greener has been a hard sell. Most decision makers find the goal of reducing carbon emissions laudable but are held back by concerns that it will cut into profits or performance. When energy costs were relatively low, arguing that a current investment would reduce future costs was an uphill battle. But today's environment might provide the harsh dollars-and-cents context that's needed to move this issue from a decision about being green to one about being fiscally responsible.
A top-to-bottom reinvention of your data center may provide the biggest bang, but there are smaller steps that all decision makers can take to improve the efficiency and cost effectiveness of their data centers. Among them:
Check the vintage of the systems in your server racks, and replace energy and space hogs. Unlike fine wine, computer hardware rarely ages edge server dns round robin gracefully. Rooting out old systems is often the easiest way to make a data center more efficient. Old hardware almost sql server dos manager always consumes more space and power than new systems. Older systems are also usually more difficult to cool efficiently. Switching to more modern systems often allows for impressive consolidation ratios ranging from 2:1 to 10:1. You gain free game hosting server space and save energy even as server execution error in vista you increase your computing power.
In recent years, chip multi-threading has helped drive much greater efficiency in data centers without city of villians private server sacrificing great plains and server sp2 performance. CMT systems are analogous to mass transportation: Just as a bus is much more efficient than having dozens of cars on mambo server the road, multi-threaded chips can handle dozens of actions simultaneously.
Tie IT decision makers to their facilities counterparts. Regardless of how much electricity is being consumed by the data center, chief information officers aren't usually the ones writing the utility checks. This disconnect often fuels an unnecessary debate about the importance of compute power over cost savings. IT and facilities organizations need to collaborate to make sure both understand how energy-efficient computing will help address both. If you take the improved energy efficiency, the reduced space utilization and the rebates on servers offered by many municipal power server in the sky providers, the cost to go apache web server green begins to approach negligible.
Look at virtualization and container technologies. gunz private server Using the right container technologies as part of your virtualization approach isolates applications and services by using flexible, software-defined boundaries. Taking this direction can allow you to achieve even greater compression in both servers and storage. For example, one customer I worked with implemented a new storage system with built-in virtualization and eliminated 40 terabytes of physical capacity, reducing storage power and cooling costs by 60%.
During Sun's own overhaul of its data flash media server center, we achieved 2:1 server-replacement and 3:1 storage-replacement ratios. In some cases using virtualization java server pages allowed server-replacement diskeeper server torrent ratios of up to 20:1. With virtualization, you can approach the point where the cost savings in space and energy come close to equaling the initial purchase price of the equipment.
Turn on the meter at the rack level. Legacy measurement of watts per square foot in a data center may show the room is running fine on average, pitstop server keygen but in reality you have hot spots throughout that are damaging equipment. Most data centers measure load at the perimeter of the data center, which predictably makes things unpredictable. It is important to take metering one step further. It needs to be measured at the rack level (watts per rack) to truly enable energy efficiency. This enables you to reduce power consumption by pinpointing attention on certain areas in a data center instead of using the traditional, scattershot approach of cranking up the fans when a particular area in the data center starts to run hot.
When Sun decided to consolidate more than 200,000 square feet of data-center space in the San Francisco Bay windows server network connections settings area into a new facility in Santa Clara, Calif., environmental concerns were just one of several considerations. At the end of an aggressive 12-month schedule, 202,000 square feet of data-center space was compressed into just 72,000 square feet (a 64% reduction in real estate)--and power consumption was reduced by more than 60% in the first phase alone.
Sun has seen power savings of more than $1 million annually, and the company avoided $9 million in construction costs. At the same time, compute performance increased 450% while using 88% fewer rack positions. The numbers make the most compelling story. The total return on investment of best edonkey2000 server greening the data center--both financially and environmentally--can no longer be ignored.
Bob Worrall configure windows proxy server is chief information officer at Sun Microsystems (nasdaq: JAVA - news - people ).
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