Make dramatic cut in bills and carbon

Apr 30 2008 By Paul O'Donnell, The Journal

As data centres across the globe continue to consume more energy, Paul O’Donnell, sales director of data management storage company Aegis IT, looks at options to cut bills and the carbon footprint.

THE role of a chief information officer (CIO) has always been a difficult balancing act. This act has become increasingly complicated by
rising costs and fears over the economy.

Power costs and power supply are issues that have never before been on the agenda of CIOs. However, this new pressure of increasing energy costs and corporate objectives to reduce the carbon footprint is forcing them to consider their options.

In larger organisations with monolithic data centres there is a sleeping giant of a problem, the availability of power to the data centre. The problem reached fever pitch recently when a rumour circulated that a number of blue chips were moving data centres away from Docklands because any spare capacity in the grid would be used for the London Olympics.

These combined pressures have meant the power savings programmes are now on the CIO’s agenda.

On a small scale, there are a number of obvious things that can be done to reduce power consumption, such as turning off PCs at night.

But the data centre cannot be turned off and there are no power saving features in a server.

So where do you start? There are three main areas to consider: data and storage, backup and servers. Data growth is now exponential. But data use as a percentage of the amount of data stored is going down.

So, while many businesses have already bought archiving software, for some companies this simply means moving data from fast, highly available storage on to fast, highly available storage with a bigger disk.

So the net result may be a saving of a couple of disks to a tray, but this is not going to reduce your carbon footprint by much, as all this storage is always on and always using power.

Second, this has historically only been available for file and email in the mainstream.

However, there are now sensibly priced storage solutions from Nexsan and Copan that let companies move data from “always on” storage to power-managed devices.

These platforms also act as targets for back-up to disk and compliance and there are some interesting integration features coming with Oracle.

So, dormant customer records can moved to near-line, power-friendly platforms at last. Back-ups have always been a dark science.

De-duplication at both file and block level will reduce the data being backed up. Good due diligence will reduce the total data, and this can save 75% of the power previously consumed by tape if combined with a disk-to-disk solution.

This is good from an internal politics angle. There is a big win in reducing the number of lorries collecting and delivering tapes. This cuts the bill from Iron Mountain and you can give your environmental officer a tangible deliverable back to the business.

The last area that has real benefit is virtualisation. Virtualisation works like this. Your server is a big empty lorry. Your application is a can of baked beans. Would you deliver one can of baked beans in one lorry?

No, you put many cans in one lorry. Virtualisation allows you to run many applications on one server, reducing hardware costs and saving power.

Many companies Aegis works with have tested virtualisation. Yet not as many as you would think have it in a live production environment.

Why? For some companies it’s risk, for others their Dell keeps coming up with such good deals every quarter, why bother?

Aegis is now working on more projects where the exclusive driver is air conditioning and power provisioning. Customers such as the Freeman Hospital in Newcastle had 70 servers that we managed to reduce to eight.

This has benefits on a number of levels. From a power, air conditioning and space perspective it has almost become a no-brainer.

And, as with data assessment, you can do application assessment at a similar level and identify the amount of wasted power. We are seeing savings in the region of 30% for power and air conditioning requirements and 160U rack space savings per 50 to 100 servers.

These solutions are being paid for out of air conditioning budgets alone.

There is no definitive, single answer to the power problem, but there are options available. Aegis IT has many customers with the business issues outlined here.

paul.odonnell@aegisit.co.uk or call 07920 091 428