"Going Green" is all the rage these days in companies around the world. Green IT is the concept of using resources effectively and efficiently in order to reduce the "carbon footprint" of the organization. While term "Green IT" is new, the concepts behind are not and their application in the data center have always been prevalent. However, today, Green IT has become so popular that it is leading to actual legislation and governmental requirements throughout the world.
But, the reality is that, for most companies, Green IT is not necessarily a driving factor, the bottom line is. Green IT is accomplished in data centers by reducing the power and cooling requirements as well as the physical space required for the infrastructure. The benefit is that, Green IT leads to less spending. So, it can be said that Green IT is actually a by-product of running and efficient data center.
Over the past two decades, data centers have balooned due to the "one app, one server" mentality, where each server hosted only a single application. This was driven by the need to maintain availability and service levels of the application for the end users. Most of these servers were sized based on the peak needs of the application and therefore spent most of their lifetime running at only 10% utilization, wasting space, and power. However, with the re-birth of virtualization (this time on x86 servers) has led organizations to re-think their deployment strategies and enabled true server consolidation.
Virtualization works on the premise that multiple applications can be hosted on the same server, but be technically isolated in order to maintain the availability and service levels required by the user community. In addition, virtualization enables servers to be used at optimum capacity (70-80%). The end result is that data centers are shrinking. What once was a data center with 5000 physical servers now runs in just 500. The power and cooling requirements are drastically reduced, thus reducing the carbon footprint and ultimately leading to a Green data center.
PERFMAN helps enable a Green IT organization by giving organizations the visibility to optimize their data center. Whether it be through planning the server consolidation and virtualization or managing the existing infrastructure, the PERFMAN solutions support the cause of Green IT by accurately measuring and forecasting usage of servers and driving up utilization. In fact, organizations using PERFMAN are able to see enefits right out of the box.
One particular client was able to analyze their entire SQL Server farm and found that almost 50% of their servers were under 2% utilization. By consolidating these servers, they not onlyreduce the power and cooling needed, but they became more "green" in the process.
Another client, Pacificorp, was able to better plan for future expenditures. Within weeks of implementing PERFMAN, they realized that through better management, they could delay the purchase of additional servers by 18 months saving them millions o fdollars and improving their carbon footprint.
So, while Green IT is certainly a "buzzword" today,t he theories behind it are sound and their benefits are unquestionable. PERFMAN helps enable the transition to a green data center through it s ability to manage the infrastructure, discover underutilized servers and recommend their proper consolidation, and finally, to forecast the growing needs of the applications reducing the need to make additional, unrequired hardware purchases.
Read the article published by the Eastern Technology Council on Green IT highlighting PERFMAN as a solution for "going green".