Green IT
Increase power efficiency and asset utilisation
Rising energy costs are having an impact on all organisations and you will be increasingly judged on your ability to manage and reduce the consumption of energy in your data centre.
According to a recent study, a typical 3,000-square-metre data centre consumes more electricity than 8,000 60-watt light bulbs. That represents six to ten times the power needed to operate a typical office building at peak demand. Forrester Research estimates that data centres require 0.5 to 1 watt of cooling power for each watt of server power used and that a typical x86 server consumes between 30% and 40% of its maximum power when idle. Given that most data centres run 24x7x365, this represents millions of pounds just to keep systems turned on.
Techniques for improving power efficiency and asset utilisation
(1) Virtualise and Consolidate Servers
Virtualisation and consolidation are essential to energy conservation in the data centre, where IT managers have installed more and more systems to enhance performance, redundancy, and availability, but without a focus on power or cooling efficiency. Virtualisation addresses these inefficiencies by separating software from the underlying hardware, so that a single computer can run multiple operating systems and applications. In turn, better utilisation of servers and storage means deployment of fewer machines, thereby using less electricity for power and cooling.
(2) Consolidate Storage
(3) Manage Data
As much as 70 percent of the information an organization accumulates may never or only rarely be accessed. Clearly, the IT industry must minimize the environmental impact of rapid information growth by attaining higher levels of efficiency. Information lifecycle management (ILM) is based on the premise that the value of information changes over time. ILM uses automatic intelligence to store information in the most appropriate and energy-efficient storage device at every point in its lifecycle. For example, business-critical and real-time information requires systems that offer the highest reliability and performance—and therefore demand more resources and power. When that information reaches a less critical state, ILM migrates it to storage that consumes less energy.
De-duplication vastly reduces the amount of stored backup data that results from users storing multiple copies and variations of the same file in many places across the network. De-duplication stops runaway duplication by transforming data files into data segments that can be stored and re-used in multiple files. The original file is saved and backed up just once to a central server. When file edits are sent to the server, they’re in the form of new and unique sub-file data segments associated with the original, and only those new segments are backed up. De-duplication can reduce network bandwidth and backup storage by a factor of 300.
(4) Constantly monitor and review
As new technologies come on to the market greater effigies will be available so it is import to review these regularly. For example, the advent of Solid state disks brings the potential for more savings on power consumption and reduction in cooling
As new systems have greater capacity per terabyte, they use less power directly and less for cooling (savings can be 50% +). Cut storage energy costs per terabyte by over 50% through installing new storage area network equipment and rationalising servers through consolidating file servers onto shared storage and reducing the physical amount of server with virtualisation.
Typically the solutions that Alpha supply need less than half the space of your current infrastructure and are much easier to manage and less power consumption for the equipment leads to less power for air conditioning.
Through the right combination of server and storage virtualisation, storage optimisation, and power and cooling component choices, you can manage energy consumption more effectively. Alpha can help you design and deploy approaches to achieve efficiency in existing and new data centre infrastructures, and help you to manage these efficiencies in your environment moving forward.
For over 10 years, Alpha's consultants have been helping customers optimise energy utilisation in their data centres. We'll deliver a custom energy strategy that aligns your business, financial, and technology objectives—so that you can benefit from lower energy costs, increased efficiency and gain the ability to accommodate energy demand growth over time.