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Green Tech
Friday, October 03, 2008
There has been a lot of noise around companies adopting 'greener'
technologies related to IT equipment of late. The greener approach not only
saves on power costs but also lets you do your part for the environment. Vendors
have been pretty restless as well pushing their power friendly equipment to
catch on with the pulse. Through this story we look at technologies that enable
a green data center, relevance of cloud computing as a green technology, the
concepts behind building a green office; plus a tour of some of the newest green
buildings.
The biggest challenge for a datacenter today is to go green. And this is not
because we have suddenly become very nature friendly but it's because at the end
of the day when we save nature by cutting down our power, cooling, space, heat
emissions, etc we directly or indirectly save costs. The reasons for this are
simple. IT is a must for every business, and as the business grows, an
organization needs to invest more on the IT infrastructure. With the rising
energy costs, more IT equipment translates to higher costs of power consumption,
and also more space, which anyways comes at a premium. So, if products continue
consuming the power they have been consuming, then it could have serious
implications. Last year, Gartner estimated that ICT accounts for 2% of global
CO2 emissions, which is the same as the aviation industry. That's a high figure
by any means, and unsustainable as suggested by Gartner.
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To understand this need of going green, let's take an example. Well! this is
not an example but is a real life case. It's about an office in Gurgaon. The
office has around 400 computers and a small datacenter with somewhere around 30
servers and 5 blades which eats up around 150 to 200 KW of power in a day. The
consumption includes the power consumed by the cooling and lighting equipments
running in the datacenter as well as in the building.
In Gurgaon power is a major problem and to address it, the company has a 320
KV diesel generator which eats 1000 rupees worth of diesel every hour and also
throws out a lot of pollutants. But surprisingly, when in the night the city
undergoes major power cuts for hours and the office is closed, except the
datacenter which is a 24x7 operation. So, the datacenter should not require more
than a 20 KV generator, the same 320KV generator is used and a lot of fuel is
burnt without any reason and a lot of money goes for a toss.
Such a situation is nothing but wrong planning and is very common in our
neighbourhood. However, with a bit of planning, a lot of money and environment
can be saved. Below we talk about some of the key technologies that should be
used in a datacenter to make it greener.
Virtualization
This is a trend that has really picked up momentum across the IT industry,
and is a key technique being touted for going green. Every organization today is
combating the evils of server proliferation in the datacenter. There's a server
for just about every application: mail, web, proxy, business apps, security,
content management, file sharing and so on. The sad part is that their average
utilization hovers around 30-40%, if not less. And yet they continue to run 24x7
and consume energy even when they're idle. So, in effect, you're paying the
energy cost of servers, which are idle almost 70% of the time. That's not a very
pleasant thought indeed, which is why the whole concept of server virtualization
has become so popular. It helps combat this problem.
Virtualization allows you to abstract the hardware from the software. So a
server, which traditionally runs a single OS and application in the data center,
is able to run multiple OSes and apps simultaneously. This would allow you to
load a single server with more applications and increase its utilization. This
reduces the number of servers in the data center, and also helps you defer your
server purchase. With new servers more and more processing capabilities are
coming to the market and so adopting virtualization has become more easy and
efficient. In the second week of September this year, Intel has released its
7400 series Xeon processors which has 6 cores per processor. Such innovations
are driving the industry to go greener with more widespread use of
virtualization.
| Just how green is your equipment? |
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| We did a small reality check in our survey to determine how
green our respondents' respective organizations were. Out of all activities,
replacement of CRT monitors with LCD ones received the highest votes. Nearly
38% had already done this activity. All other activities received less than
30% of the votes, which basically means that organizations still have a long
way to go before they become truly green. |
Cloud Computing
If you extend the concept of virtualization from a single server to a
complete grid, and make its access available over the Internet, it's called a
Cloud. Just imagine, if virtualizing a single server can save you 50 to 70% of
resources then how much savings will happen in case your complete data center
acts as a single grid and is then virtualized. We have a complete section on
what Cloud computing is and how it helps in going green, at the end of this
story.
Power and backup
It's always good to use renewable sources of energy such as solar and wind.
But it might not be feasible for all datacenters to go for such deployments as
the costs are huge and the ROI is slow. But there are certain things which can
be easily done, such as using UPSes instead of generators.
Yes, even though UPSes are not great for the environment (especially if old
batteries are not disposed properly) then it can cause a lot of harm to the
nature. But they have their share of goodies as well. First, they don't eat up
oil and second, they save a lot of smoke and money given the sky-rocketing
prices of petroleum products.
Moreover, they preserve power. So, if I go back to the Gurgaon datacenter
example, we can easily replace the generator with a UPS, and so when the
utilization of power is less in nights, the UPS will only supply the desired
amount of power and will increase the backup by preserving the unutilized power.
So if the UPS can give a 2 hour long backup in the day when the office is fully
active, it can give you a 6 hour backup in the night when only 10 or 20%
equipment are working.
Blade servers
Blades are a great way of saving energy and e-waste. They let you increase
the density of your datacenter to multiple levels. A single 7U blade chassis can
take up to 14 blades which saves your real estate space and in turn reduce the
ambient cooling requirements (as you can host your datacenter in a smaller
space). Blade servers are generally built with specialized processors which eat
less amount of electricity. In Intel's dictionary these processors are called LV
(low voltage) processors and their performance per Watt is higher than others,
but are not the highest performing processors in the lot.
In our tests we found that a single blade server while running eats up around
150 to 180 watts of electricity whereas a standard server rack mountable server
eats up 250+ watts. So, you can see a sure power saving in this.
The other benefit which you get with blades is that most of the blade vendors
today provide chassis which are both backward and forward compatible, which
means you can easily replace the existing servers with new ones as and when they
are available, and can do more virtualization to consolidate instead of buying
new servers. The vendors also provides buyback schemes for old blades against
new ones pretty often, so it also solves your e-waste problems as you don't have
to throw away those blades. You might as well save some money by giving them
back to the vendors.
Green equipment and components
It's not just servers and blades that need to go green and consume less power,
many components today come with a greener version. These versions are
essentially products with slightly reduced performance (in some cases) and
better power efficiency along with less harmful elements in the body of the
device (paint, metal, wires, etc). A lot of such products are available out
there, ranging from a simple network switch to hard disks and even processors;
all of them today have greener versions. And yes, all these components are a
part of your datacenter, so if while building or upgrading a datacenter, you
should look forward to such equipment.
Shield Your Datacenter-or be Doomed
As data scales up, the processing power to manage it, storage capacities,
cooling needs and server numbers surge skywards. IT managers and consultants
have turned to consolidate the number of servers that run on their network, or
they chose to virtualize depending on data load at any given point of time, in
order to use lesser servers at optimum levels of capacity. Most enterprises
today have embraced virtualization to the point that RoIs are calculated easily
by analyzing business needs and virtualizing a considerable number of servers to
reduce losses. Everything is going just fine. Profits for the next financial
year sound very promising. Right?
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Wrong. While virtualization has given businesses a fair say in how the
network and IT operations of a company perform, there is still one important
component of the IT infrastructure which is by and large ignored – security.
Interestingly, there are products out there that do not require you to dent your
company finances too much. Besides exorbitant costs, the other big reason for
security being rated quite low on a network manager's list is the complexity of
having to interact with multiple vendors for multiple applications, software and
maintenance of network security. To a great extent, this concern can be
eliminated as security vendors are looking to go to market with 'all in one' box
format security devices which require the network manager to deal with just one
vendor.
An ideal example is Check Point's newly launched Power 1 range of online
security applications and the more robust UTM 1 Total Security offering. The
idea of Power 1 is to combine firewall, IPSec, virtual private networks (VPN)
and intrusion prevention with advanced acceleration technologies, delivering
high-performance multi-Gbps security platforms. They promise performance up to
14 Gbps firewall throughput, at a price/performance ratio of around $4 per Mbps.
With a 6.1 Gbps intrusion prevention speed, application layer threats can be
identified and eliminated fast. Also, mission critical businesses that happen to
experience application security threats, such as worms or buffer overflows, are
now capable of stopping them while maintaining high performance and
uninterrupted business. Hardware upgradations are needed only when the company's
networks grow or need to be scaled up. According to an internet vulnerability
study by IBM's X Force Global Technology Services, high severity vulnerabilities
increased last year by 28 percent, and interestingly vendors with the most
vulnerability exposures were Microsoft, Apple, Oracle, IBM and Cisco. To add to
the misery, only 50 percent can be corrected through vendor patches, and even in
2007, 90 percent of vulnerabilities could be remotely exploited, and this
percent has marginally gone up this year.
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