Posts Tagged ‘virtualization’

Green Data Centers: Federal Government Insights Part 5

January 11th, 2010

previous post: Part 4 – Data Center Power and Cooling

Conclusion

Today’s data centers are not built with energy efficiency in mind. It is true that uptime is the main concern of any data center manager and owner but when energy bills become overwhelming, it is high time to think how to reduce them. Green technology is one of the proven ways to save on energy.

There are many steps you can take in order to make your data center green. Consolidation, virtualization, power management, energy efficient equipment (especially power supplies), and cooling are the top priority areas towards a greener data center. If you make improvements in any or all of them, you will see how this affects your energy consumption in a positive way and you will also make your contribution to save the environment.

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Green Data Centers: Federal Government Insights Part 3

January 11th, 2010

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.

Next: Part 4 – Power and Cooling

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Cloud Computing: The Next Wave of Federal Computing? – Part 3 of 3

December 22nd, 2009

Securing The Cloud

“The primary issue with security is perception. But the cloud is more secure [than traditional systems] because it was built with security in mind.” - (Eran Feigenbaum, director of security, Google Enterprise)

Federation and the Federated Cloud

Well, it’s pretty much here today.  Take for example Salesforce.com which interoperates with Google Apps, Twitter, Facebook, and several other cloud-based services.  Many of these services have open developer APIs to integrate into their services so this type of interchange will only grow with time.

How Ready is the Federal Government?

In this writer’s humble opinion the future efficiency of the federal government will depend on economic models similar to cloud based computing solutions.  From a technology perspective, it will not be an overnight process.  Most of the big cloud services providers have free sandboxes where CIOs can test migrations of some of the applications we mentioned in part 2 of this series.

This is clearly where our government technology infrastructure (or at least a part of it) is going.  Let’s get moving.

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Cloud Computing: The Next Wave of Federal Computing? – Part 2 of 3

December 15th, 2009

Cloud Computing: Where to Start

In this post we’ll cover how the federal government should approach the notion of cloud computing.

  1. Planning – If cloud computing is where we will inevitably be in the next decade, agency CIOs should be strongly urged to make every new piece of new technology introduced into their IT environments cloud-ready.  CIOs should also be made aware of external triggers that could prompt their organizations to move applications into the cloud, such as an expiring software license.
  2. Enterprise 2.0 as a Catalyst – Collaboration tools seem the obvious place to begin enterprise cloud migrations.  These tools are made for the cloud and are relatively painless to integrate into a cloud environment.  This seems like a logical and easy first learning application of cloud computing in an agency’s IT plan.
  3. HR Applications – HR application make sense because they tend to be very seasonal.
  4. Development and Testing – see HR applications.
  5. Disaster Recovery – We’re seeing a lot of our customers moving their disaster recovery systems to the cloud.  Given the unlimited storage capacity and quick-to-live nature of cloud computing, this seems natural.

Mike Hill (IBM) has said that ITM has been spending a lot of time implementing private clouds for government and banking clients with sensitive data and workload issues.  “What we’re finding is that it’s workload driven,” Hill remarked about which applications are ready to move to the cloud.

On the short list of other applications that are cloud-ready:

  • case management
  • project management
  • economic development
  • grant management
  • service management
  • travel and tourism
  • and housing applications

Potential Pain Points

IT managers must also be made aware of the potential pain points that are associated with a cloud migration.  These include computing, network and storage infrastructure, issues with virtualization sprawl and the need for better management tools, security, and cloud federation.

Tools like IBM’s Tivoli and Microsoft’s System Center handle “islands of automation” but there is no broadly available tool that deals with the overall cloud computing issue.

Next Post: Cloud Computing and Security

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Cloud Computing: The Next Wave of Federal Computing? – Part 1 of 3

December 9th, 2009

Vivek Kundra (the US Federal CIO)  moderated a panel of experts on cloud computing yesterday at the “Cloud Computing Shootout”.

Cloud computing is a simple concept.  It’s all about scalable and on-demand computing and storage.  Think of the ‘cloud’ as a near infinite (for practical purposes) array of servers representing an abundance of computing power and storage space.  Customers access only as much of this ‘cloud’ as they need to run their respective applications.  The paradigm shift is very similar to the virtualization you may be seeing in your data center, but on a one-step back larger scale.  Cloud computing is to data centers what virtualization is to individual  servers.

Cloud computing is not a new concept.  It’s actually been around in the internet community for quite some time.   Amazon release the first widely available cloud computing services (s3 and ec2) between 2006 and 2007.

This entry is the first of a 3 part series on Cloud Computing in the Federal Government.

The two parts in this series:

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