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Nov 10

More and More and More on Green IT

GeneralPost by Mike DiPetrilloAdd comments

Every time I meet with a customer and every where I turn I see more and more about “Green IT”. Sure you can save power by consolidating servers and that’s where most customers stop. What they don’t realize is that about 80% of the power that IT uses is actually outside of the datacenter being used by desktops. Some people also don’t realize that the chillers that are working hard to cool your datacenter are only about 40% efficient to begin with. Oh, and don’t forget about all of the lights left on in your datacenter all the time. Probably the biggest thing people don’t take time to think about is that the power that’s feeding your datacenter is most likely coming from a coal plant somewhere near-by and by the time the power hits your transformers it’s only 1% efficient.

So why am I ranting about all of this? It’s to get you to think. If you’re truly going to be a Green IT environment then you need to think beyond just server consolidation and what that can do for you. You need to start thinking about the bigger picture. Of course that’s hard to do since nearly every CIO I’ve talked to admits they don’t see the total power bill for what they’re using. A lot of that is absorbed in a facilities budget somewhere. Maybe it’s time for a walk down the hall to bring the two groups together.

At any rate, the thing that got me started on all of this (at 1 am in the morning) was an email I got from The Computer Management Group. They’ve now added a Green IT track around virtualization at their upcoming conference in Vegas on Dec 7 – 12. For anyone that’s going make sure to check out the track additions. It will be interesting to see if they really pull back the covers on this whole Green IT thing beyond just server consolidation.

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  • Here at the Reunion Island we are facing more and more the energy crisis issue. That's why there is a "project Reunion 2030". This project will bring 100% of the renewable energy for all the population of the island. FYI the Reunion Island is a french territory, close to Mauricius. We are about 800 thousand people living here and the environmental issues are for me essentials. I work in the IT industry here since 4 years.
  • That's a great point Mike.

    People need to think about it from a holistic standpoint.
    How much juice do Dell towers sitting next to every desk eat up, versus a thin client pointing at a desktop VM running on VI in the datacenter? A lot less. What about those six boxes sitting under each QA engineer's desk? Couldn't they be in the datacenter too, being managed by VMware Lab Manager?

    And what's funny, is that not only are they drawing power to run them, but they even affect the HVAC levels in a building. Rather than using datacenter chillers, you're using good-old AC, which is likely even less efficienty than those chillers.

    Of course, less a problem in the Winter I suppose, where your trusty Dell PowerEdge tower doubles as a cube-heater... ; )

    And if you think about how VI3.5 has feature like Distributed Power Manager, that consolidates idle VMs, without having to power them down, you're looking at seriously green IT: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7CbRS0GGuNc (I love this video by the VMware performance team. Shows how enterprise software can indeed rock.)

    So here's the next question: when carbon taxes go into effect, how is that going to modify the TCO model of virtualization projects?

    A kilowatt hour currently costs around $.07 in most parts of the US. And a kilowatt of power coming out of a coal power plant typically puts about 2 pounds of C02 into the air. So it's going to take 1,000 kwh to get a ton of C02 into the air.

    Estimates vary as to what carbon will end up being priced at, but a round number that I've seen chatted up has been $15 per ton of C02. So that's going to add 1 1/2 cents to each kilowatt.

    Essentially, electricity just became ~20% more costly. So using cutting edge virtualization management tools to enable more efficient use of electricity isn't just about being "green" but CIOs and IT Directors making sure they can save their business some greenbacks.
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