Green and Lean: Four Steps to Improving Data Center Efficiency without Capital Expenditures

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It is no surprise that a green technology strategy has rocketed to the top of the CXO's priority list. Given energy's rising and disproportionate share of overall technology costs, its potential to limit growth, and the heightened awareness of energy consumption issues around the world, CXOs see green computing as an opportunity to cut significant costs, maintain growth, and improve the corporate image in the process.

But don't expect their attention to translate into significant new budget allocations to solve the problem. Realistically, companies must find solutions that substantially reduce operating costs and, most importantly, work within existing capital budgets.

When New Infrastructure Is Out of the Question...

Power issues are becoming an increasingly common problem facing both small and large companies. EMC is a typical example. The company was experiencing a 70 percent annual increase in data center workload on the heels of recent acquisition activity, and energy loads were becoming a concern.

"Some of our primary data centers had minimal bulk power and cooling available to support the current environment," explained David Scheffler, EMC's Director of Data Center Operations and Global Infrastructure Support. "With floor space also in short supply, we were in a difficult position to add capacity in response to new business demands."

Also, like many companies in this situation, EMC didn't have the luxury of a large capital budget to replace its current infrastructure with newer energy efficient equipment.

What they needed was a creative approach to improving the energy efficiency of existing assets while delivering more information and processing capacity to meet the growing needs of the business -- without adding to current data center capital equipment expenditures.

...Affordable Alternatives May Be the Best Approach Anyway

When companies first consider what it takes to be green, many believe significant capital investments are required. Certainly, creating a green data center from the ground up, including installing clean power sources such as solar to reduce energy consumption from the grid, or using more efficient, environmentally friendly building materials in the construction of new data center space does not come cheap.

But, even if a company has the investment capital available, is this approach always the best use of that capital? No, reports the Uptime Institute. Their research indicates that companies that install fundamentally new, greener site infrastructure systems are not likely to find the investment worthwhile once the increased risks of moving to new technology are factored in.

Fortunately, there are alternatives that allow companies to achieve their green objectives without big capital outlays. The Uptime Institute goes on to suggest that a more effective approach is to look carefully for incremental changes that improve the efficiency of existing data center assets and have the added value of extending the life of those assets. They caution, however, that companies following this path must take a coordinated, systematic approach to determining the collection of changes that will maximize the overall efficiency and capacity benefits.

A Four-step Methodology to Success

Some companies have already experienced considerable success going green without adding to their capital budgets by focusing initially on four cost-cutting/cost avoidance measures:

1. Measuring Baseline and Projected Consumption

By determining the current and projected energy consumption and costs across the data center as well as total power and cooling capacities from business as usual, companies can focus their initial efforts on the areas that are now, or will be, the most acute.

This requires knowing how data center power is currently consumed. What are the peak power demands of the data center? How much of the power delivered at the utility meter is consumed by power conditioning equipment? By cooling equipment? By IT equipment including servers, storage and networking assets? Knowing these figures, along with the detailed components that contribute to each, will allow companies to make more objective decisions as to which collection of improvements will maximize the benefit on overall efficiency, operating expenses and capital requirements.

2. Freeing Floor Space

One of the first places to look for efficiency improvements is floor space. Eliminating unneeded equipment has the combined benefit of reducing the capital demands required to add new floor space while lowering data center power consumption and heat output.

By knowing how servers and storage are being utilized, companies can determine which machines can be eliminated and how workloads can be distributed among the remaining machines to maximize efficiencies. Companies should not only analyze storage and server utilization rates, but also classify applications and information to identify where service level mismatches exist, which applications are no longer being used, and which information is no longer being accessed.

3. Analyzing Power and Cooling Efficiencies

In addition, an analysis of power and cooling efficiency may show where cooling capacity and its associated power consumption is being wasted. By applying thermal analysis, pressure and humidity analysis, and tile flow measurements, companies can develop heat removal calculations that quantify the benefits of specific mechanical and structural changes.

Can equipment be repositioned or airflow redirected to eliminate hot spots? Doing so may allow existing cooling capacities to handle the cooling demands of not only the current equipment, but also the projected environment. This exercise can help companies reduce the risk of heat-related outages and optimize power distribution and temperature management.

4. Reducing Ongoing Power Consumption

Lastly, companies can reduce power consumption and cooling requirements by following best practices to optimize their ongoing storage and server environment.

One area to analyze is storage consumption. Data de-duplication software can help companies identify and eliminate redundant information that can occupy as much as 95% of total storage volumes. Companies should also examine backup processes to determine how smaller snapshots can be used instead of full volume clones and mirrors to reduce the requirements for operational data copies.

Companies can minimize the amount of storage they need by looking for storage capacity that can be eliminated and then making sure the capacity that remains is used to the fullest extent possible. By eliminating direct attached storage and moving to tiered networked storage arrays wherever possible, companies can often eliminate large pockets of unused storage capacity. Software technologies like resource management software automate service level policies, helping ensure that information is always placed on the most cost-effective storage platform and that storage utilization is maximized.

Similarly, companies can use server virtualization technologies to reduce the number of physical servers needed and improve the overall server utilization rate. The benefits of server virtualization include lowered power and cooling requirements, as well as a reduction in the number of physical servers that need to be procured, installed and supported each year.

By refreshing any end-of-life technology with newer, energy-efficient server and storage platforms that support server virtualization and networked storage tiers, companies can improve overall efficiency even further.

Increased Efficiencies Saves EMC Millions of Dollars, Avoids Costs, and Achieves Environmental Goals

The potential cumulative benefits of this coordinated approach can be substantial. EMC addressed its power issues by conducting a targeted assessment of the current energy consumption in its main data center. This exercise enabled the project team to develop recommendations for implementing thermal improvements and improving efficiencies in the power distribution chain, IT consumption, and cooling systems.

With a relatively small investment of time and money, the company achieved some impressive results. Today, floor space utilization is flat even though workloads continue to increase 70% annually. EMC's data center personnel are now able to manage nearly three times the storage capacity thanks to consolidation efficiencies. Using server virtualization technology to reduce and consolidate the environment, EMC was able to virtualize 1,357 servers onto to 231 physical machines, which eliminated the infrastructure (and its associated operating costs) needed to support 1,126 servers.

"Over a 3-year period, we're expecting to save more than four million dollars in space, power and cooling costs," explained Scheffler. "These efforts have helped EMC avoid a tech refresh, and extend the life of our main data center. From an environmental standpoint, over three million pounds of carbon emissions will be eliminated as well."

Bring Facilities, IT and Executive Teams Together to Ensure Success

Although data center efficiency is often the focus, delivering the benefits of a green data center strategy should not be an IT-only problem. Structural, maintenance and mechanical considerations must be combined with the obvious technology factors to determine the best solution.

An incremental investment in outside resources with the specialized knowledge, tools and methodologies to perform power and cooling efficiency analyses, server virtualization, information classification, consolidation, tiering, etc., often pays for itself in lowered operating costs and improved capital efficiencies. Their expertise can be instrumental in helping companies execute a successful green data center strategy that extends the life of existing data center assets without breaking the capital budget in the process.

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