Keeping your data ‘green’

By Jeffrey Hill, Senior Research Analyst for Data Management and Storage at Aberdeen Group

One of the most compelling aspects about going green for many companies is that the kinds of activities that support sustainability also support increasing efficiency, using resources, and lowering overall infrastructure costs.

“40% - the amount of data centre power that actually gets used by servers”

This fortunate coincidence of objectives makes introducing greener concepts into an organisation much easier, even for people who are ‘doubtful’ about the substantive benefits of green. For example, recycling has tangible benefits beyond helping to decrease the amount of plastic and glass plowed under in landfills. I visited a foundry that machined brass and copper fittings in the early 1970s and was amazed how much usable material was reclaimed on the foundry floor. Back then the primary aim was to reuse costly materials in the manufacturing process; now the primary might be to reuse materials and meet corporate or stakeholder expectations for green. Both goals nicely coincide with saving money.

Virtualisation

This fortunate coincidence of green goals is highly apparent in IT organisations and data centres around the world. Consolidation of applications and servers through virtualisation is an inherently green thing to do because fewer servers means lower power consumption and lower requirements for cooling, but it is also the right thing to do for cost and management reasons. Server virtualisation is also about increasing overall infrastructure efficiency, and perhaps even more importantly, server utilisation. Servers are frequently over-provisioned to support applications (for example, database) that are transactional in nature - lots of record writing and reading requires a robust server and fast storage to maintain acceptable performance. As a result, storage capacity often becomes underutilised, the opposite of what we would wish for in an efficient infrastructure model.

So, consolidation of applications on virtual servers is a good way to break the IT practice of 'one application per server' and thus increase overall utilisation. Thin provisioning of storage, in which allocation of storage is controlled by a software storage manager so that applications are dynamically allocated storage capacity on the basis of need is another way to increase capacity utilisation and infrastructure utilisation. Using storage tiers is another way to increase utilisation. In fact, one of the reasons IT organisations implement Information Lifecycle Management policies is to codify the movement from one storage tier to another. Once transactional data has lost its currency, the data needs to be moved to lower cost, lower-performance storage. In an ideal world, we would have a good understanding of what data needs to be retained, say for regulatory purposes, and for how long. Such knowledge would make buying storage more predictable, but the current flood of information generated by knowledge workers in organisations of every size makes it unlikely that companies will stop or even slow adding capacity.

Monitoring

Even though the data centre is a conspicuous consumer of power and cooling, most IT departments don't see the utility bill -- often that bill goes to another part of the organisation. This practice is changing however, as better methods of monitoring consumption by servers and storage become available. It is estimated that only 40% of the power coming into the data center actually gets used by servers, but rising energy prices and the threat of global recession is forcing companies to take another look at consumption throughout the organisation. Efficient use of the infrastructure not only helps control costs, it also increases manageability.

Organisations don't start out being efficient; it takes a commitment at all levels to work towards efficiency. As with a green initiative, the company needs to implement a purposeful strategy of increasing utilisation of existing resources. IT organisations need to incorporate the company's strategic initiatives and goals into their infrastructure planning, acquisition, and retirement activities. In this way, IT not only makes a substantial contribution to the company's green initiatives, it also enjoys the resulting efficiency and cost savings.

Factoid: 40% the amount of data centre power that actually gets used by servers

Jeffrey Hill focuses on technologies and market trends in the area of data management and storage by researching and writing about topics that are of interest to end-user companies. His research examines components of the data centre infrastructure such as servers and storage, but also looks at the best practices companies use to manage data through virtualisation, storage, back up, archiving, and disaster recovery.