Virtualization Can Help Power Efficiency

Today's businesses are beginning to face real challenges with regard to energy consumption and costs. If servers continue to consume electric power at their current rate, Google Fellow predicts hardware could soon be overtaken by the cost of power. Analyst firm IDC agrees and pegs 2010 as the year when the cost of power could overtake the price of hardware  ¹ . Gartner Research made that warning even more poignant recently by noting energy costs could soon represent more than half the cost of running a data center  ² .

The complexity of optimizing business operations in a global economy continues to grow, and escalating fuel costs and increased demands for processing power drive datacenter power consumption costs. Refinements in lower CPU power consumption ease the pain somewhat, but new multi-core processors and advanced power management technologies can boost the containment of energy consumption and cost. But the most dramatic effect can be realized through the reduction in the number of servers.

Virtualization is a technology designed to provide an application workload with an independent computing environment and a service level objective without necessarily powering up new resources. Among the potential benefits of resource virtualization are higher rates of resource utilization for servers, storage, and networks. As a result, fewer physical resources may need to be turned on. What's more, that potential reduction in power consumption may occur without any additional capital expenses. That's why most CIOs are taking a fresh look at virtualization and tool sets, such as the IBM Systems Director.

Green Datacenters
With customers looking to hardware and software vendors for solutions and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) studying corporate datacenters as an area for possible energy savings, leading computer hardware and software manufacturers, including IBM®, AMD, and VMware sponsored The Green Grid (link resides outside of ibm.com).

This association of information technology professionals is seeking to help lower the overall power consumption datacenters Not surprisingly, The Green Grid has drawn kudos from the EPA and the Energy Star Program, which promote energy efficiency. The EPA believes that a significant reduction in power consumption by servers and storage devices could have a profound economic and environmental impact.

In Europe, escalating corporate consumption of electrical power is even more problematic and the European Commission has introduced the notion of the triple bottom line (people, planet, profit) in an important attempt to focus on driving sustainable long-term growth. The European Commission's green paper on corporate social responsibility calls for companies to report environmental impact statistics, such as power and natural resource consumption, in their annual reports.

“Among the potential benefits of resource virtualization are higher rates of resource utilization for servers, storage, and networks. As a result, fewer physical resources may need to be turned on.”

Real Green Virtually
Virtualization is an alluring solution for rationalizing the current management practice of dedicating a single workload to a server. This practice came into vogue because it helped increase the reliability, availability, and scalability (RAS) characteristics of applications by running multiple images. By restricting rack-mounted servers to running just one workload, IT was able to enhance service levels and more easily manage systems with workloads not competing for server resources.

Nonetheless, that configuration policy left rack-mounted servers underutilized: Typically, these systems have utilization rates of only approximately 10%  ³ . To improve upon that low level of utilization of resources, many IT departments are looking at virtualization as a way to rationalize the RAS benefits of isolated workloads with potentially higher server utilization. By isolating workloads in virtual machines, IT may be able to retain a high level of RAS and the ability to support service level agreements. By running multiple virtual machines on a single physical server, IT may be able to raise the level of server utilization.

Introducing virtualization and potentially garnering the power savings that may result in the consolidation of existing server and storage hardware can be a first step in helping to reduce power consumption. The next step centers on the use of new server technologies that may help to further cut consumption.

Taking Efficiency to the Next Level
IBM System p™ and System i™ servers present a dramatic picture of the potential to utilize resources more efficiently and increase energy efficiency. What is compelling about these servers is the ability to create multiple logical servers supporting processor allocations as fine as a tenth of a CPU via IBM POWER5™ microprocessors.

Similar savings can be garnered with the IBM BladeCenter®, which provides a central chassis for sharing power among a number of server blades. Whether AMD, Intel, or Power CPU modules are used, blades can provide a savings of up to 19% to 24%  ⁴ when compared to rack-mounted servers  ⁵ . The BladeCenter can be especially advantageous when used to centralize desktop computing with virtual PCs using a virtual client solution.

Power consumption savings can be even greater when storage consolidation is taken into account. Storage resources are among the biggest consumers of energy in a datacenter. What's more, storage continues to grow annually by an astonishing 50%  ⁶ . In particular, a single IBM Ultrastar sever disk will have a power consumption rating of about 22 watts. A base level 1.6 GHz Intel® Xeon® processor will carry a rating of about 58 watts. Now consider a typical configuration with a 4-way SMP server supported by 140 disk drives: Storage will consume 13.5 times more power than the processors.

The Comprehensive Solution to Being Green
While the “easy” solution to the problem of escalating power costs would be a breakthrough discovery of a new, plentiful, and cheap source of energy, such an immediately improbable event has the entire IT community searching for alternate solutions.

At the frontline of this challenge, IT managers will be called upon to develop comprehensive ideas, strategies and best practices to help make their environment more energy efficient. The success of any solution may pivot on a sophisticated approach to datacenter management that focuses on virtualization, utilization, consolidation, and effective workload management.

IBM pioneered virtualization on the mainframe 40 years ago and is readily equipped with all of the resources to implement strategies designed to address this need.