Skip Links

Network World

  • Social Web 
  • Email 
  • Close

Cut your electric bill with virtual machines

Power considerations of consolidation
By Andreas M. Antonopoulos , Network World , 10/24/2006
Andreas Antonopoulos

Computer hardware gets cheaper and more powerful at the rate of Moore’s Law. But now, businesses have to contend with an opposing trend: energy costs are increasing around the world, as emerging economies such as China rapidly ramp up their demand for energy.

Beyond the short-term fluctuations in core energy prices coming from geopolitical instability, the long-term trend has turned upwards. Many organizations trying to implement “dense” strategies for their data centers have turned to server-virtualization technologies such as VMware, Xen, Microsoft Virtual Server and others to consolidate low-utilization servers.

Often the justification for such projects and the ROI are found in hardware savings. But the decreasing cost of servers makes that ROI shrink year after year.

On the other hand, the energy savings can be substantial. The only problem: The person responsible for server strategy has probably never seen an electricity bill for the data center.

From an efficiency perspective, what really matters in the data center is not how many servers are “housed,” but instead how much productive computing is done on these servers. Most of the power consumed by a server does not go to “productive” work in the form of computation. Heat losses and inefficiencies in the power supplies, motherboards and peripherals consume large portions of the power. Fans within the server, in the racks and around the data center push air around to cool all the components, using up a tremendous amount of power.

Even when a server CPU is completely “idle” it consumes a tremendous amount of power just sitting there, heating up the room. The data center environmentals then consume a lot of power trying to cool a server that is not producing much.

Server virtualization technology can therefore allow you to move these loads to other servers, increasing CPU utilization and freeing up servers. If you turn those idle servers off or use them to expand your workload capacity and applications, you can greatly increase the power efficiency of your data center.

Data center managers may never see the electricity bill for the data center. In many organizations the electricity bill goes to a facilities or real-estate management unit that has little relation to IT. Thus, one of the greatest areas of potential savings (and increasingly painful costs) is hidden from IT.

Partner Content

Explore the Ultrium Edge

The powerful tape technology can address data security with tape encryption as well as long term data protection.

Find out more

Disk and Tape Square Off

Discover what disk and tape really cost -- and which solution provides lower total cost of ownership and optimizes energy use for your organization

Download the White Paper

Don't Fall For The Myths

The Clipper Group explores the truth behind the myths of tape, digging into the misconceptions in the disk vs. tape debate.

Download the White Paper

Will You Add Tape Too?

Over two thirds of disk-only users look to add tape back into storage infrastructure according to recent survey.

Download Survey Information

Comment
Login
Forgot your account info?
Add comment
Anonymous comments subject to approval. Register here for member benefits.
Have a NetworkWorld account? Log in here. Register now for a free account.

Videos

rssRss Feed

Whitepapers

Retrospective Network Analysis

In this whitepaper learn how Retrospective Network Analysis (RNA) has proved a different type of...

SNMP Monitorin One Critical Component to Network Management

SNMP is a valuable tool to any network administrator who requires complete visibility into the...

Monitoring and Managing App Performance

This paper defines application analysis, discusses the different categories of tools on the market,...

Webcasts

Direct from Microsoft: Tips for Integrating Exchange 2007 and Double-Take Software

Double-Take (r) Software and Microsoft are teaming up on September 9, 2008 for a webinar focusing...

Transforming the Enterprise WAN Edge: Video from Cisco

Life on the edge of your WAN has changed dramatically. With the need to deliver advanced services,...

PoE Plus: Impact on the PoE Market

The standard for Power over Ethernet (PoE), IEEE Std. 802.3af(tm)-2003, advanced networking,...

Special Reports

Data Centers: At the Center of Action

Archiving, backup and data protection take on ever more critical roles in the enterprise. Data...

The New Network/System Management Challenges

Increasingly popular technologies such as virtualization, wireless networking and data center...

Virtualization Reality Check

Find out why analysts say approaching virtualization with an ounce of caution is wise. And also why...

Get instant email notification when white papers, webcasts, executive guides are added to our library. Stay informed and up-to-date with the latest on IT Technologies with Network World's Resource Alerts.