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At the heart of this growing "green virtual gap" is messaging by the industry, or lack thereof, and the need for more awareness of the core issues of IT organization in different parts of the world or even different parts of the United States.
One good example is the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) focus on how data center energy use affects the overall environment. Because the EPA is concerned about IT data centers having reliable flow and use of electricity, it has developed Energy Star programs to stimulate energy conservation and improved efficiency, which have the added benefit of boosting demand-side management.
As a result of greater energy efficiency in data centers, companies save costs, cut down their greenhouse gas emissions, and reduce the overall strain on the power grid -- a win-win-win situation for the EPA, businesses of all sizes, and the environment as a whole.
The Many Faces of Green: Environmental and Economic
In order to support business growth and ensure economic sustainability, organizations of all sizes need to establish a strategy to address the impact of their power, cooling, floor space, and environmental health and safety (PCFE) needs.
PCFE addresses the many different facets of being green for IT data centers, as shown in Figure 1, including emissions as a result of electricity energy production; cooling of IT equipment; efficient use of floor space; power for uninterruptible power supplies (UPS), backup, electricity generation and transmission (G&T), cost of power, and supply/demand; and disposal (removal of hazardous substances [RoHS], waste electrical and electronic equipment [WEEE], adherence to the LEED [Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design] program).
Also critical to PCFE are environmental health and safety (EHS) topics, including elimination of hazardous substances, traditional and e-waste disposal, and recycling. In addition to supporting growth, the business benefits include the abilities to leverage new and enhanced information services, enable business agility, and improve on cost effectiveness to remain competitive while reducing effects on the environment.
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As a society, we have a growing reliance on storing more data and using more information-related services, both at work and in our personal lives. All of this is causing the boom in demand for data services, and the resulting pinch on energy supplies.
There is some parallel between the oil crisis of the 1970s and the current buzz around green IT and green storage along with power, cooling, and floor space issues. During the 1970s oil crisis, there was huge pressure to conserve and avoid energy consumption, and we are seeing similar messaging around power avoidance for storage, including consolidation and powering down of servers and storage systems.
Following the initial push for energy conservation in the 1970s was the introduction of more energy-efficient vehicles. Today we are seeing a similar trend in IT resources, notably a focus on more energy-efficient servers and storage for both active and inactive applications, which also incorporate intelligent power management or adaptive power management along with servers and storage that can do more work per watt of energy.
In order to support the expanding data footprint and reliance on timely information services, more servers, storage, networks, and facilities are required to host, process, and protect data and information assets. IT services companies are finding that their customers are increasingly asking for solutions and products that meet any of a number of green requirements, from overall energy efficiency to carbon neutrality to companies that have greened their supply chains.
Regardless of what stance your company is taking on green issues, the reality is that from a performance and economic standpoint, the solutions offered by a green data center cannot be ignored. There are business benefits to aligning the most energy-efficient and low-power IT solutions combined with best practices to meet different data and application requirements in an economic and ecologically friendly manner.
Establishing a Green PCFE Strategy
Different issues have varying impacts and scope, depending on specific plan points or requirements along with several alternatives for addressing on a near-term tactical and longer-term strategic basis. Several approaches are shown in Figure 2.
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Figure 2 shows the PCFE or Green "wheel of opportunity." The various tenets can be used separately or in combination to address near-term tactical or long-term strategic goals. The basic premise of the PCFE wheel is to improve energy efficiency, by doing more with less, and/or boosting productivity and service levels to maximize IT operating and capital yields.
For example, by maximizing energy efficiency, more work can be done with highly energy-efficient servers and storage that process more transactions, IOPS (input/output operations per second), or bandwidth per watt of energy.
Activities for implementing a Green and economically efficient data center includes:
• Mask or move issues, leverage carbon off-sets, out-sourcing and cloud resourcesWhy Virtualize A Data Center?
• Consolation of servers, storage, networks, software and facilities
• Reduce data footprint (Archive, delete, compress, de-dupe)
• Tiered IT resources including servers, storage, virtual, physical and cloud services
• Energy avoidance -- tactical
• Boost energy efficiency -- strategic
• Heating, Ventilation, Air-Conditioning (HVAC) and Facilities Review
• Environmental Health and Safety (EH&S) E-Waste; Recycle, Reuse, Reduce
• Financial incentives and rebates
• Best practices, policies, metrics and measurements
A virtual data center can and should be thought of as an information factory that needs to run 24-7, 365 days a year, to deliver a sustained stream of useful information. For the information factory to operate efficiently, it needs to be taken care of and seen as a key corporate asset. Seen as an asset, the IT factory can be invested in to maintain and enhance productivity and efficiency, rather than being considered a cost center or liability.
The primary focus of enabling virtualization technologies across different IT resources is to boost overall effectiveness while improving application service delivery (performance, availability, responsiveness, security) to sustain business growth in an economic and environmentally friendly manner. That is, most organizations do not have the luxury, time, or budget to deploy virtualization or other green-related technologies and techniques simply for environmental reasons -- there has to be a business case or justification.
Virtual data centers, regardless of whether new or existing, require physical resources to support a diverse and growing set of application capabilities while sustaining business growth. In addition to sustaining business growth, applications need to be continually enhanced to accommodate changing business rules and enhance service delivery. Application enhancements include ease of use, user interfaces, rich media (graphics and video, audio and intuitive help), along with capturing, storing, and processing more data.
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Figure 3 shows four basic approaches (in addition to the obvious, most basic approach of doing nothing) to energy efficiency. One approach is to avoid energy usage, similar to following a rationing model, but this approach will affect the amount of work that can be accomplished. Another approach is to do more work using the same amount of energy, boosting energy efficiency, or the complement -- do the same work using less energy.
The energy efficiency gap is the difference between the amount of work accomplished or information stored in a given footprint and the energy consumed. In other words, the bigger the energy efficiency gap the better, as seen in the fourth scenario, doing more work or storing more information in a smaller footprint using less energy.
Shifting from Energy Avoidance to Energy Efficiency
There is a lot of focus on energy avoidance, as it is relatively easy to understand and it is also easy to implement. Turning off the lights, turning off devices when they are not in use, enabling low-power, energy-savings or Energy Star modes are all means to saving or reducing energy consumption, emissions, and energy bills. Ideal candidates for powering down when inactive include desktop workstations, PCs, laptops, and associated video monitors and printers. Turning lights off or implementing motion detectors to turn lights off automatically, along with powering off or enabling energy-saving modes on general-purpose and consumer products has a significant benefit.
Given the shared nature of their use along with various intersystem dependencies, not all data center resources can be powered off completely. Some forms of storage devices can be powered off when they are not in use, such as offline storage devices or mediums for backups and archiving. Technologies such as magnetic tape or removable hard disk drives that do not need power when they are not in use can be used for storing inactive and dormant data.
Avoiding energy use is part of an overall approach to boosting efficiency and addressing PCFE challenges, particularly for servers, storage, and networks that do not need to be used or accessible at all times. However, for applications and data that need to be available and accessible, boosting energy efficiency is an important and strategic topic. Simply put, when work needs to be done or information needs to be stored or retrieved or data moved, it should be done so in the most energy-efficient manner aligned to a given level of service.
General approaches to boost energy efficiency include:
• Do more work while using the same or less power.
• Leverage faster processors/controllers that use the same or less power.
• Consolidate slower storage or servers to a faster, more energy-efficient solution.
• Use faster disk drives with capacity boost and that draw less power.
• Upgrade to newer, faster, denser, more energy-efficient technologies.
• Look beyond capacity utilization; keep response time and availability in mind.
• Leverage IPM, AVS, and other modes to vary performance and energy usage.
• Manage data both locally and remote; gain control and insight before moving problems.
• Reduce data footprint impact, enabling higher densities of stored data.
Greenwashing and green hype may be on an endangered species lists, but addressing core IT data center issues to enable more efficient and productive IT service delivery by information factories in an economical friendly manner will also lead to environmental benefits.
Addressing green and PCFE issues is a process; there is no one single solution or magic formula. Rather, a combination of technologies, techniques, and best practices to address various issues and requirements is needed. Green washing and green hype may fade away, but PCFE and related issues will not, so addressing them is essential to IT, business growth, and economic sustainment in an environmentally friendly manner.
Greg Schulz is the founder and Senior Analyst at StorageIO, as well as the author of The Green and Virtual Data Center (Auerbach/CRC) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier).
