AKIBIA'S PRACTICAL GUIDE TO ENTERPRISE TECHNOLOGY
Wednesday, February 11, 2009
Practical Green IT
As many companies have pushed its benefits, and positioned their solutions as helping to achieve "Green IT", the topic has come to represent many things to many different people. It is certainly one of the most hyped IT terms of the past two years. It offers important environmental benefits such as reduced footprint and carbon emissions, and it saps less of the energy supply. Green IT initiatives can help improve an organization's relationship with its community. While many would argue these reasons are important enough to address on their own, there is another reason that has made Green IT so attractive to the public and private sector alike: It reduces costs, and it can increase efficiencies.
There are many avenues to look at and consider when "going green." Today we will briefly address data center consolidation, data center migration and virtualization. All promise to reduce cost through the reduction of power and cooling, but adopting these technologies and realizing the best possible return can be challenging. Let's take a look at each of these Green IT solutions and evaluate practical implementation.
Consider first consolidation, which is also addressed by CIO Magazine on a regular basis. It sounds easy enough to go through your current infrastructure and determine which pieces of equipment are actually in use, which are fully utilized, and which can be removed or consolidated. Practically however, this can be a challenge. Server sprawl, combined with ineffective cataloging of systems means most IT departments do not have a total inventory to start the process from. That makes consolidation costly and time-consuming as man hours are spent updating outdated systems inventory.
In some cases it may be more practical to consider consolidation in conjunction with a data center migration. Many organizations are considering data center relocations already in order to save on rents, or to take advantage of reduced energy prices in another region. In the process of preparing for a migration you are already documenting your systems. Identifying unnecessary systems for consolidation is a natural output of this step. When migrating to a new data center, you may also consider leveraging blade servers and containerization as well as virtualization. This allows you to take advantage of a "hat trick" of savings, while also going green in the data center.
Let's explore virtualization (again, CIO Magazine) and its savings potential in more detail. By leveraging virtualization to run multiple systems from a single server, you can reduce the footprint of your data center by eliminating physical servers. Consideration must be given in the overall architecture of this deployed solution to insure business continuity. By reducing the number of physical servers in your environment, you can also contain server maintenance costs or better leverage the systems you have already, delaying the purchase of new servers, a tangible cost savings that makes this aspect of Green IT very compelling.
Virtualization can provide additional savings if you leverage the servers you've replaced. To do this, you need to partner with a company that can purchase the unused equipment from you, or leverage the parts for spares within your own maintenance program. You can also sell the used parts on the open market directly, but to do that, you need to have a process in place to ensure the systems are thoroughly cleaned of old data and information.
It's clear that Green IT efforts can lessen business impact on the environment and resources. It's also clear that certain Green initiatives can save money—the other kind of green. In order for Green IT to be truly embraced in business it must meet two important goals – Reduce Costs, Improve Efficiencies – clearly consolidation, migrations and virtualization are among the Green IT initiatives capable of achieving both, when put into practical use.
