Energy Efficiency: The New SLA

Design Editorial

Tuesday, 30 December 2008 16:01

Written by Bruce Naegel

Indeed, while lowering energy consumption has traditionally been considered primarily an environmentally sound practice, it is now also a proximate and pressing corporate directive that has CIOs taking notice. What’s more, the interdependence of these SLAs adds a level of urgency since the organization that runs out of power will also likely be unable to meet performance, availability, and security requirements.

These efforts must also begin now to mitigate the risk of rising power costs as well as to avoid penalties for non-compliance with future energy-related regulations. Legislation has already been passed in the U.K. to compel businesses to reduce their carbon footprint, with failure to meet targeted levels resulting in significant financial penalties; similar energy efficiency regulations are likely to follow in states throughout the U.S.

Organizations should also act now to take advantage of rebates for energy efficiency. Incentives for saving power are offered by a growing number of utility companies such as Austin Energy, which currently offers rebates up to $200,000 for data center efficiency.

Clearly, IT organizations must quickly begin to avoid the risks of poor power management and reap the rewards of energy efficiency in a cost-effective, well-managed way. The good news? By leveraging many of the same software tools IT routinely uses to deliver on performance, availability, and security SLAs, organizations can also significantly reduce power consumption and meet business requirements for increased energy efficiency.

At the Endpoint
In a typical 24-hour period in an office environment, desktop PCs, laptops, printers, monitors, and other corporate endpoints often are on but inactive. This presents compelling opportunities for energy savings. For example, while a running laptop consumes between 25 and 35 watts, a laptop in standby mode consumes only a watt or two. Yet, many PCs are simply not configured for optimal energy efficiency.

A number of IT management tools include power management capabilities that can help organizations take advantage of potential energy savings. These tools enable organizations to set power management policies and apply them to all the endpoints in their environment. Devices can be powered on and off automatically, according to policy, so that they remain off outside normal office hours and come back on when appropriate. Configuring endpoints with optimal energy efficiency may also make organizations eligible for utility rebates that further reduce power consumption costs.

In addition, replacing standalone desktop computers with thin clients, where possible, also yields energy efficiencies. When running, a thin client consumes approximately seven watts compared to the 30 to 60 watts consumed by a traditional desktop computer.

At Storage
Organizations can significantly reduce storage power consumption by making better use of existing storage. By identifying and then removing or reassigning unused storage, reclaiming over-allocated storage, and removing inappropriate data such as MP3 files, organizations can increase storage utilization and, in turn, reduce storage power draw. Organizations that have leveraged their existing enterprise storage management tools to address these issues have reported seeing utilization improvements of between 30 and 40 percent, according to July 2008 Energy Efficient IT Case Studies recorded by Symantec Corp.

Organizations can also create storage power efficiencies through storage tiering. Tier 1 arrays typically have the highest power consumption per gigabyte of protected storage, while arrays that are designed with power efficiency in mind draw only a fraction of that amount. The intelligent use of tiered storage can significantly decrease power consumption.

In many cases, storage tiering capabilities may already be provided by the organization’s online storage management toolset. These tools may automatically move file data among tiers based on a range of pre-selected rules and without service impact. They may also support space-optimized snapshots that can dramatically reduce the amount of storage required and allow these snapshots to reside on lower storage tiers, which further reduces power draw.

In addition, virtualizing storage can provide for more efficient storage by giving virtualized storage pools to multiple applications. This improves storage utilization, thereby reducing the need to purchase more storage disks. By virtualizing storage, organizations can not only decrease power usage but lower cooling costs as well.

At the Server
Although power efficiency may not be the primary reason for deploying clusters, N+1 clustering is effective in reducing power draw by increasing server utilization and decreasing the number of servers required to support an application. For example, one organization with a range of clusters, from 2+1 to 8+1, reduced the number of servers required to support their mission-critical applications by a total of 42, which also drove a total power supply savings of approximately 204 KW, according to the Symantec report.

Holding multiple copies of data wastes valuable disk storage that could and should be used for more beneficial business purposes. By using the data deduplication capabilities of their backup solutions, organizations may be able to reduce by 98 percent the amount of redundant, duplicate data that they would otherwise inadvertently back up and store. This, in turn, reduces the amount of disk space required for backups and archives, which also reduces the storage power consumed.

Of course, while many organizations may choose to implement energy-efficiency software capabilities on their own, others may prefer to work with consultants. These consultants typically leverage best practices based on thousands of previous engagements as well as industry frameworks such as ITIL to ensure that the organization’s energy-focused efforts are integrated into its overall, ongoing IT management processes and procedures.

As businesses around the world struggle to meet new energy SLAs, IT organizations can take advantage of the capabilities of many of their existing data center software solutions to dramatically reduce power consumption throughout the entire IT infrastructure. With capabilities to improve power use at the endpoint, storage, and servers, organizations can take a holistic approach to meeting not only the performance, availability, and security requirements of the enterprise but also the energy challenges of today and tomorrow.

About the Author: Bruce Naegel, senior product manager, data center management group, Symantec Corporation

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