previous post: Part 2 – How to Make Your Data Center Green
Consolidation
One of the first steps you need to take in order to make your data center greener is to consolidate. In a typical data center it is not an exception to see servers, which are running at 10% to 15% utilization. 100% utilization (if possible at all) is risky, especially in the long run and you can’t afford to utilize your machines that much but if you consolidate two, three, or more machines into one, this immediately translates into two, three or more times less energy to power and cool them.
In addition to heavily under-utilized servers, there are also idle servers. Idle servers don’t perform any useful job but they still consume energy.  Idle servers could constitute up to 30% of all servers and if there is no way to monitor them and turn them off when they are not in use, this drastically increases your energy bill.
If an idle server is a more recent one, chances are that it uses some sort of power management, which means that its energy consumption is lower but still even with the best power management solutions, an idle server can consume up to 30-35% of the energy it needs when fully utilized.
Consolidating idle and under-utilized servers might not look like a big deal. However, when you have in mind that each server costs at least $500-600 a year in terms of electricity, and you have hundreds of servers, the savings you can achieve by reducing the number of running servers is considerable. What is more, this consolidation will in no way impact your operations negatively, so the dilemma is not whether you pay to have the job done or save money but the dilemma is if you want to pay when no job is done or not.
Virtualization
Virtualization is one of the technologies, which can make the most for the success of your green efforts. Virtualization allows to consolidate multiple logical servers or storage devices into one physical unit and is by far the most efficient consolidation technique.
Virtualization requires special software, which as a rule is not free. VMWare is the leading provider of virtualization solutions for data centers and its products are designed with energy efficiency in mind. In addition to VMWare’s products, there are many other free and paid virtualization products and if your budget can’t provide for a paid virtualization solution, you could consider some of the free, open source ones.
Virtualization is becoming a de facto standard for a data centers and there are hardly many data centers where no virtualization solution is implemented. Of course, this doesn’t mean that virtualization is a panacea because it does introduce some problems (for instance there are applications, which require a dedicated machine and misbehave when virtualized) but generally virtualization is one of the major approaches to a greener data center.
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