Basic Steps For Building a Green and Virtual Data Center

Part 10 in a series. Greg Schulz is the founder of StorageIO and the author of The Green and Virtual Data Center.

Lets take a look at the steps that can help to evolve toward a green and virtual data center that is able to sustain business growth while addressing economic and environmental concerns. Although reducing carbon footprint and emissions are important and timely topics, the reality is that for many environments, public relations and environmental stewardship are agenda topics, but economic and business sustainment are the fundamental objectives.

Just as there are many different issues that fall under the green umbrella, there many different approaches and opportunities to address them. These include power, cooling, floor-space, EH&S (PCFE), cost reduction, and sustainment of growth. The following summarizes various action items and opportunities that we have been discussion in this series.

There are a variety of action items and opportunities that can be used to address PCFE and green Issues:

Financial incentives -- These include rebates, low-cost loans, grants, energy affiance certificates. They can be used to offset energy expenses and technology upgrade costs with rebates or leave potential money on the table.

Metrics and measurements -- Calculate total energy usage and resulting footprint, along with how much work is being done or data is being stored per unit of energy consumed. It can provide insight and enable comparison of productivity and energy efficiency to gauge improvement, success, and environmental impact.

Infrastructure resource management -- Try to leverage best practices, protecting and securing data and applications while maximizing productivity and resource usage using various technologies. This will let you reduce IRM complexity and costs, boost productivity by doing more with less while enhancing IT service delivery, including performance and availability.

Mask or move problems -- Options include outsourcing, using managed service providers, software as a service (SaaS), or cloud services, and buying carbon offsets to meet emission tax scheme (ETS) requirements as needed. You can utilize carbon offset credits to comply with ETS when needed; leverage lower-cost services when applicable without compromising IT service delivery.

Consolidation -- You can leverage virtualization in the form of aggregation of servers, storage, and networks; consolidate facilities, applications, workload, and data. This will reduce physical footprint to support applications and data conducive to consolidation, balancing savings with quality of IT service delivery.

Tiered resources -- You can use various types of servers, storage, and networking components that are sized and optimized to specific application service requirements. Such a move will align technology to specific tasks for optimum productivity and energy efficiency; balance performance, availability, capacity, and energy.

Reduce data footprint -- You can shrink the amount of data you have to store through archiving, compression, de-duplication, space-saving snapshots, thin provisioning, and data deletion. This will eliminate un-needed data, move dormant data offline, compress active data, and maximize density.

Energy avoidance -- You should power down resources when not in use, using various energy-saving modes. Identify applications and IT resources that are conducive to being powered down and turn them off when not in use, including workstations and monitors.

Boost energy efficiency -- Upgrade to newer, faster, denser, more energy-efficient technologies, and leverage tiered servers, storage, and networks. This will maximize productivity and the amount of work done or data stored per watt of energy in a given footprint, configuration, and cost.

Facilities tune-up -- You should leverage precision cooling, review energy usage, and assess thermal and computer room air conditioner performance, as well as eliminate halon and other environmentally unfriendly items. This can reduce the amount of energy needed to cool IT equipment, doing the same or more work while reducing energy costs and usage.

Environmental health and safety -- Recycle, reuse, reduce, eliminate e-waste and hazardous substances. You need to comply with current and emerging regulations, including those involving removal of hazardous substances.

It's not what you know, it is how you use it. With that in mind, keep in perspective all of the different techniques, technologies, and best practices discussed in this book that can be applied in various combinations to address PCFE or green issues. The principal takeaway for this installment is to understand the different aspects of being green along with the technologies and techniques that can be used for different situations. Green IT means more than just a focus on carbon footprints and closing the Green Gap enables IT organizations of all types to address PCFE and other issues to transform and enable flexible, scalable and resilient optimized environments.

Action and takeaway items include:

-- Data and storage access and life-cycle models are changing.

-- Metrics are important for gaining insight into resource efficiency.

-- Virtualization can be used to enhance productivity and IT agility.

-- Capacity planning should cover servers, storage, networks, and facilities.

-- There is a difference between energy avoidance and energy efficiency.

-- A green and virtual data center can reduce costs.

-- Efficiency and optimization means more than consolidation, they also mean boosting productivity.

-- Cloud computing, including cloud storage, is another tier of IT resources.

-- A green and virtual data center can reduce energy usage and emissions.

-- A green and virtual data center can enable growth.

-- A green and virtual data center can maximize or extend IT budgets.

Greg Schulz is the founder of StorageIO, an IT industry research and consulting firm. He has worked as a programmer, systems administrator, disaster recovery consultant, and capacity planner for various IT organizations, and also has held positions with industry vendors. He is author of the new book "The Green and Virtual Data Center" (CRC) and of the SNIA-endorsed book "Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)".

InformationWeek has published an in-depth report on data center unification. Download the report here (registration required).