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THE GREENING OF BUSINESS

From STORAGE Magazine Vol 7, Issue 4 - June 2007

There is growing recognition that our traditional energy supplies are neither endless, nor secure - and that climate change is a growing threat to our future. In Part 2 of our focus on a greener world, we look at how some organisations are trying to make a real difference

According to research by the BroadGroup's Power and Cooling Survey 2006, data centres are one of the UK's biggest energy consumers. The research found that an average UK data centre uses more power in one year than the city of Leicester and there are currently at least 1,500 data centres in operation across the UK alone. Ultimately, the rising number of data centres is translating into increasingly large carbon emissions released into the atmosphere.

"As pressure mounts to reduce carbon emissions, it is now time for data centre managers to seriously rethink the technology driving their data centres and the resulting environmental impact," comments David Galton-Fenzi, group sales director, Zycko.

With corporate Britain happily now jumping on the green bandwagon - 40 top British companies pledged in March alone that they will shrink Britain's carbon footprint by cutting their own energy use and turning green consumerism into a mass movement - the signs are encouraging for a future where business needs and the preservation of our planet are not mutually exclusive.

BT, for example, has already cut its carbon emissions by 60% since 1996, saving more than one million tonnes of CO2 per annum. However, as a major consumer of electricity - it still accounts for around 0.7% of total UK consumption - it has the scale to make an even greater impact on UK carbon targets. Overall, its green IT efficiency drive extends from data centres to applications-level consolidation.

BT's One IT consolidation project, for instance, has enabled it to decommission and consolidate more than 1,000 racks of servers, resulting in a net saving of 22GW hours per year. "We calculate this translates to a cost saving of just under £1.8 million per annum or around 3,110 metric tonnes of carbon per year," says BT's Steve O'Donnell.

CARBON REDUCTION LOGIC
Not every eco-friendly company is leaping up and down, demanding that its tree-hugging credentials be recognised and applauded. EqualLogic, for example, is a VMware Technology Alliance Program partner and a cornerstone of that partnership is a joint effort to fully integrate EqualLogic's PS Series iSCSI SANs with VMware's suite of virtual infrastructure solutions. This commitment to virtualisation enables them to support a growing base of customers and resellers who require both virtual storage and server technologies to simplify their data centre operations.

EqualLogic and VMware have been increasing their market penetration as a result and helping customers to reduce their carbon footprints significantly through the advancement of its technology, benefiting its own bottom line, while ensuring a reduced environmental impact. However, as far as the company is concerned, business success and being seen to be green go hand in hand and are a natural progression in its development.

"We don't go out of our way to emphasise our green credentials,” says Steve Muddiman ,EMEA marketing director, VMWare, “but the net effect of virtualisation is certainly to deliver strong benefits in this area. Virtualisation delivers fundamental value and also brings significant power and space savings as a result. For every server that is removed from the data centre, approximately 1.1 tonnes of CO2 emissions are saved. So this delivers a value back to the business, while the enterprise itself contributes to a greener environmental strategy."

One business pursuing such green opportunities by embracing virtualisation technology from EqualLogic and VMware is Channel 5 (see page 32 for the full story). Not only is virtualisation driving huge efficiencies across the business; it is also reinforcing the broadcaster's top-down driven initiative to reduce the company's carbon footprint. This is all about identifying energy-saving initiatives, according to the company, which sees the potential to make major savings in power and space usage by investing in server virtualisation, while also supporting the future growth and development of its business.

VMware is also acutely aware of how servers are now using more power than ever before. As the company's Reza Malekzadeh, director product marketing & alliances, EMEA, points out: "A typical server ten years ago consumed 100W of power, whereas the average server today now consumes around four times as much energy, according to IDC.

“Data centres are also now packing more servers into the same physical space, rising from an average of seven servers per rack to fourteen.

"According to our own estimates, shifting an application over to run within a virtual machine can save an average of just over £150 per year in electricity costs, while savings in cooling costs can add up to an additional £188," Malekzadeh adds. "Server virtualisation also ensures that energy consumed is used more efficiently. The average CPU utilisation rate before virtualisation is normally between 5% and 15%; virtualisation increases this to more than 70%."

IMPACT ANALYSIS
Alan Laing, CA technical specialist, storage, believes that two forces are driving organisations and vendors alike to evaluate their energy efficiency: cost and concerns over rising CO2 emissions, largely brought about as a result of enterprise.

"They started by assessing the direct impact of their own operations," he says, "and now clients are looking at ways to reduce the indirect impact of their supply chain, and are consequently demanding a response from vendors. This year, we've increasingly seen hardware vendors highlighting 'green' issues as a key priority for them.

"The indirect role of software organisations like CA should be considered in the story. I see one of the consequences of these drivers is a growing trend towards server virtualisation. Instead of creating multiple servers, you would be creating multiple server instances, thus drastically reducing the amount of hardware required - the less hardware, the less power consumption.

“However, as a result, there are real challenges to managing this virtual environment and this is where software management companies like CA have a role to play, with the capability to manage these virtual infrastructures.

"In the storage area, through CA's Recovery Management portfolio, which includes both CA ARCserve and CA XOsoft technologies, we are already providing technologies today that enable organisations to protect and manage their virtual environment more efficiently. This is enabled through virtualisation-friendly functions, such as installation or upgrades on any number of virtualised machines in one simple step, support for VMware Consolidated Backups, and protection of critical data through backups, continuous application availability and data replication from physical servers or clusters to virtual servers, or any combination.

This enables organisations to implement and manage virtualisation technology to a much greater degree, he argues, in both primary and disaster recovery locations. “CA also helps organisations to prioritise mission-critical data and to archive non-critical information to portable storage, which ultimately helps clients to reduce their disc footprint." ST