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It’s true that physical servers have reduced in size over the past twenty years thanks to commoditisation, and the old fridge-sized devices have made way for today’s more manageable “pizza box” configurations. In addition, processing capacity has been roughly doubling on a two-year cycle for the past forty years, a trend which is expected to continue until at least 2020.

However this extra power density and increased processing capacity has contributed to higher energy and cooling demands in modern data centres. Computing resource can become so focused in one particular area that there is insufficient power available to utilise any extra space. This gives rise to a dangerous paradox where it becomes cheaper to build a whole new data centre than to retrofit an old one to create extra usable space.

Creeping costs

The rhetoric around energy and space savings has created a view that virtualised servers provide automatic cost benefits. Indeed, many companies have sought to mitigate data centre inefficiencies with virtualisation. However it is worth noting the areas where costs can creep up on you. For example, the standard specification of a server purchased to host virtual machines (VMs) is usually much higher than that of a standalone server. Hosting multiple virtualised servers requires more CPUs and significantly more memory, both of which contribute to higher power requirements and heat output.

After virtualising 100% of its physical servers a company will need more operating system images than it did previously. The physical and environmental footprint may have changed but the IT department will still need to monitor, patch, secure, backup and license the virtualised servers and applications, and now the host servers as well. Requirements such as high availability further increase infrastructure costs.

In reality, consolidation through virtualisation is not the silver bullet to increasing IT Efficiency.

The road to efficiency

Server rationalisation should be part of any virtualisation project. New IT Efficiency tools identify what is useful, and this informs an ongoing process to reclaim unused resources and avoid unnecessary expenditure.

Traditional tools designed for systems and operations management struggle to deliver reports on the utility of each server. CPU utilisation reports represent how much “usage” took place. Most servers carry standard software for corporate environments – antivirus software, systems management, backup and event monitoring – so each server reports a specific amount of usage but fails to reveal whether or not that usage is useful or in other words, whether it provides any business value.

Virtualisation has clear benefits, including a reduction in energy consumption and floor space, but to get the most out of virtualisation, organisations must invest in tools which monitor efficiency; specifically the amount of useful work their IT assets undertake.

Software licences

In addition to the overprovisioning of servers, there is software licence waste on every corporate server. Businesses spend heavily on enterprise applications, some of which end up unused or infrequently used. According to analyst estimates, the total cost of licensing and running servers is approximately 80-90% of total software spend.

The software applications all have various, complex licensing rules. Deploying tools that help you understand actual usage helps to identify situations where a premium licence can be replaced by a standard model or even cancelled if it’s not in use.

Diverse licensing models across different applications are complex to manage and can lead to deliberate overprovisioning as an expensive way to avoid the wrath of auditors. The outcome is IT waste and operational inefficiency.

Taking control

Data centre energy demands are becoming increasingly complex as inefficiencies abound in physical and virtual environments, resource usage, and software licences. Moving business services to the cloud creates further potential for inefficiencies. It’s time for businesses to take control of their server estate. The road to IT Efficiency can be embarked on by taking three clear steps:

1. Optimize your environment – Take a retrospective look at your environment to assess efficiency rather than uptime or performance. Do this before instigating a systematic approach to virtualising, going into the cloud or any IT redesign. Your ‘efficiency audit’ will identify hidden leaks in terms of cost, wasted energy, unused software, inefficient hardware and legacy systems that should be decommissioned instead of virtualized or taken into the cloud.
2. Set a benchmark for efficiency – once you have identified what percentage of servers are doing useful work; whether any of the software you own is unused; and then taken steps to eliminate such waste, you can establish a benchmark for efficiency and accurately monitor for signs of sprawl in the future.
3. Be prepared to find waste and inefficiency – when communicating the benefits of your efficiency audit back to the business, champion the savings you have made or stand to make, in quantifiable cash, energy or tonnes of reduced CO₂ emissions. 

Time is money: why wait?

Written by Andy Hawkins, Product Manager at 1E.

 

 

1 Growth in data center electricity use 2005 to 2010 by Jonathan Koomey

• Posted on: 27th January 2012 at 12:00am
• Topics: Energy Efficiency;