PLANNING AND LEADERSHIP FOR A BETTER WORLD
PLANNING AND LEADERSHIP FOR A BETTER WORLD | Table of Contents: |
Interest in data center energy efficiency is spiking. Servers, applications and storage devices have been surging out of control for years, consuming ever-greater amounts of electrical power.
If that weren’t enough, IT gear is running hotter than ever, thanks to steadily increasing chip densities and the advent of blade servers, causing cooling equipment to work overtime. To top things off, in 2008 and 2009, these trends ran smack into the worst economic crisis in a generation, spurring many IT executives to look for ways to pull the plug on rampant power consumption.
The stakes are high. Running out of power may mean a costly data center overhaul or the construction of a new data center, notes IDC analyst Jed Scaramella. “The key is to avoid getting to that point,” he says, adding that it’s cheaper to make some changes now than to make wholesale changes later.
A recent IDC survey found power and cooling to be the top concern of IT executives, with 21.8 percent calling it their No. 1 challenge. Data center space, often linked with power and cooling, was third with 12.4 percent. (No. 2 is availability/redundancy/disaster recovery with 15.5 percent.)
In addition, power and cooling have been the cause of server or storage downtime for 49 percent of the survey respondents. Other problems, such as increased operational costs (44 percent) and constrained deployment of new systems (33 percent), were also among the top energy-related issues.
Although energy-efficiency efforts overlap with green IT initiatives, the two are not identical. Green IT often encompasses alternative energy sources, such as solar and wind power, as well as taking into consideration pending cap and trade legislation. The primary aim of energy efficiency, however, is to cut costs and reduce waste.
Shocking Discoveries
As IT pros strive to get a handle on energy usage, they can be in for quite a jolt.
“We found some applications and servers that just weren’t being used,” says John Felton, CIO of Sprint. “Some applications were running, and no one was doing anything with them. They just left them, and they were consuming power and resources.”
Gordon Bruce, CIO of the
city and county of Honolulu,
who launched a data center overhaul soon after his
appointment as CIO in 2005, tells the same story.
“I started by taking inventory,” he recalls, adding, “No one could tell me what
they had or where it was. I found some equipment that hadn’t been used in
years, but was powered on.”
It may seem like a no-brainer, but taking down an idle application
and the server running it can require diplomacy,
and the discussion is not always easy. Different stakeholders need to be
brought to the table and told what’s in it for them.
“You have an applications person, a business person and an operations support person, and it’s hard to get them all working together,” says Sprint’s Felton. “But we partnered and got people from different teams to work together.”
Most of the dead applications he found were intended to generate reports that were no longer needed. The next step was easy. “By getting the application out, the hardware was relatively simple to remove,” says Felton.
The payoff for Sprint was significant. By retiring 127 applications, removing or redeploying 2,239 servers and freeing up 291,042 gigabytes of storage, the company saved $30 million in energy, hardware, software and maintenance fees in 2008. Most important, Sprint stopped its runaway power consumption, which was growing between 10 percent and 15 percent per year.
“We were going to run out of power in two of our major data centers,” says Felton, adding that running out of power would have meant new data center construction, with costs in the millions. “Now we have flatlined, and we think we can get it to go down.”
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