Accelerate your Green Initiative with Capacity Management

Design Editorial

Thursday, 09 October 2008 14:33

Written by Vernon Johnson

IT has a number of options available to contribute to the enterprise’s green initiative.  Capacity Management is one of the disciplines that can help you quickly deliver Green benefits. 

Using capacity management as a focal point of your green strategy can help you optimize your IT services for power, cooling and space utilization. Capacity Management is comprised of the capacity planning, performance management and predictive modeling disciplines.

Measure and Monitor Green Parameters
The first step you should take when optimizing your IT infrastructure is to determine what parameters you care about. Do you need to reduce space requirements, cooling, power consumption or all of the above?

Depending on your system monitoring software, it may be possible to gather most or all of the environmental data needed to support your green effort, including power and temperature data. Most IT operations have sensors for measuring power and temperature, but if yours does not, those sensors can easily be obtained and put in place.

Figure #1

Once your environmental data is being gathered, you can use it to select a representative time period, which needed to establish a starting place (baseline) for your green project. The baseline is used to gauge progress of the  project, permitting you to quantify and communicate the value of your success once work is completed.

Making things use less

One way to reduce resources is to tune services and applications.  The data you gather can help the performance management specialist find poor performing services and applications. Once identified, they can find ways to improve them.  This work is a win-win as tuned applications use fewer resources and in doing so deliver improved customer experiences.  Once the tuning work is completed, the baseline provides measurements by which your success can be quantified and communicated to management.

Power, Cooling and Space Requirements
Mature IT organizations knowledgeable in IT service optimization realize that capacity planning is a crucial, early step in any virtualization and/or server consolidation project. Capacity planning ensures that systems will meet service levels while accommodating future workloads.

Capacity planners always consider equipment costs as a key part of their planning efforts, however they do evaluate various aspects, such as raw capacity and performance, in their search for the optimal solution. Green aspects, such as infrastructure power, cooling, and space requirements, are becoming at least as important as up front costs. According to a 2007 Environmental Protection Agency report, data centers consumed about 60 billion kilowatt-hours (kWh) during 2006. The energy consumption of servers and data centers has doubled in the past five years and is expected to almost double again in the next five years to more than 100 billion kWh, costing companies about $7.4 billion.

The capacity planners’ goal is to find a solution that uses the fewest computing assets to satisfy service levels while continuing to support forecasted future growth. Over-provisioning is a poor use of corporate capital and makes an enemy of your CFO, yet under-provisioning can result in broken service levels, impacting business units and their customers. This balancing act is why you have a capacity planning team in the first place.

Capacity Planning in Action
In the charts below you can see a six year forecast of response time for a particular workload after implementation of a server consolidation project. Figure 2 shows the forecasted performance using server configurations that will result in the data center consuming 13.1 gigawatt hours of electrical capacity to power its servers over the course of six years. Figure 3 shows a better-performing configuration, but notice that the power consumption is much higher, 15.7 gigawatt hours over the six year period.

Figure #2

Figure #3

Using the example provided above and assuming an average utility rate of $0.20 USD per kilowatt hour, the power consumption savings alone from going with the lower-performing configuration would be $520,000 USD over the six year period. Assuming the cooling costs are similar, the high-performing configuration will cost more than $1 million USD more, in addition to greatly increasing the carbon footprint of the data center.

As you can see, considering green aspects during capacity planning, include the cost of space, power and cooling, is important in developing an overall total cost of ownership calculation for the evaluated configurations. By simply including such ongoing operational costs when evaluating solutions, you can improve profits while at the same time greening your data center.

Other ways to go Green
Choosing components of a green strategy is difficult. Green computing has many aspects. Some green computing solutions may fit your organization’s goals; others may not. Let’s quickly look at a sampling of the different methods that can support your green initiative .

Equipment Optimizations
IT infrastructure such as servers, routers, printers, PCs, etc. can be tuned and/or configured to use less power, cooling, and floor space. You might attempt to use fewer servers, perhaps by way of server consolidation, in order to reduce the number of power- and cooling-hungry devices in your data center. Another strategy might be to employ PC hibernation or even set up procedures or policies for powering down devices when they are not in use.

Other ways to green your IT infrastructure are to institute recycling policies for decommissioned equipment, and to purchase equipment locally in order to reduce shipping, which adds to your organization’s total carbon footprint. Another green tactic is to purchase equipment that has a longer operational life or is more easily repaired.

Facilities Optimizations
Tuning your IT equipment isn’t the only way to go green. You should also take a look at your buildings, grounds, and vehicles. You can optimize buildings by using renewable power sources, automating lighting controls, switching to fluorescent bulbs, including skylights, building with naturally sustainable materials such as bamboo, and by keeping live plants indoors to help purify inside air.

Leverage your landscaping to improve efficiency by planting trees to create shade for buildings, thus reducing cooling requirements. You can plant green buffer zones rather than concrete in order to reduce surrounding temperatures, and use rainwater for irrigation. You can use greener corporate vehicles, switching to electric, hybrid, or other more environmentally friendly transportation. You actually reduce your company’s use of buildings and transportation by facilitating and encouraging telecommuting, making it possible for employees to work without coming to the office.

Consumables Optimization
There are a large number of consumable items that are used daily in a typical IT operation. Reducing the amount of consumables, and thereby reducing the amount of materials destined to become waste, is a necessary part of any comprehensive plan to go green.

Paper reduction can be accomplished by storing reports electronically then viewing them on display screens when needed.  Doing so saves paper, toner, ink, wear and tear on equipment, and reducing power requirements. Distributing reports electronically also saves on the use of shipping or couriers. When you do have a need to print a stored report, print only the portion that is needed rather than the entire report and print it on paper with some reasonable percentage of post consumer content.

The Choice is Yours
If it isn’t already, “green” should be an important part of your corporate culture. It should be a matter of policy that environmental considerations are to be taken into account for all projects, not just IT projects. And even within IT you should pursue multiple tactics for decreasing the environmental impact of your operation.

As you will find, there are more ways to go green than there are reasons for going green. With so many possibilities, it can be difficult to choose where to start your green initiative. As with capacity planning, it is a balancing act.  If your efforts appear meager, you could be viewed as less than sincere about your concern for the environment, triggering public cynicism and suspicion. It could  touch off negative publicity from a project that was honestly intended to bolster your organization’s image.

With a sound strategy and the right initiatives to implement it, IT can quickly provide realized reductions in your organization’s carbon footprint, improving its public image and reducing costs while improving service.  Truly a win-win situation for your organization and the environment.

About the Author: Vernon Johnson is with TeamQuest Corporation. http://www.teamquest.com/

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