The Power and Cooling Benefits of Hyper-V Server 2008 R2

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1 The Power and Cooling Benefits of Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 Contents Introduction. 1 How Much Power and Cooling Does Your Data Center Require?. 2 How Microsoft Hyper-V R2 Reduces Power and Cooling Requirements and Your Utility Bill. 3 Creating an Energy Efficient Data Center with Dell Servers and Intel Processors. 4 Brought to you compliments of: Introduction Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 (Hyper-V R2) is a bare metal hypervisor that allows multiple virtual machines to reside on one physical server. The many benefits of virtualization have put Hyper-V R2 high on the list of IT strategies that every cost-conscious company should consider. By consolidating physical servers, virtualization reduces server sprawl saving money on space, lowering the cost of IT overhead, offering great flexibility through live migration and workload balancing, and greatly reducing the power and cooling requirements of the data center. Servers have to be powered up and then cooled down. Utility rates never go down and as data centers expand, all the powering up and cooling down inflates IT budgets. Cutting power costs is an effective way to reduce IT expenses and most efficiently achieved by reducing the number of servers in the data center. Understanding how Hyper-V R2 can reduce an organization s utility overhead requires first understanding how much power and cooling its data center actually requires now and into the foreseeable future and then applying Hyper-V R2 s benefits to estimate how power and cooling requirements will be impacted Dell and TechTarget

2 How Much Power and Cooling Does Your Data Center Require? No company can run a data center without electricity to power servers and a cooling system to keep equipment from overheating. It s such a basic requirement that it can be easily overlooked as a cost that needs to be managed and controlled. The fact is, power and cooling costs quite a lot, about $200 per server per month. That s $2,400 per server per year, a number that quickly becomes significant as it is multiplied over the 10s, 100s, and 1,000s of servers inside a data center. There are ways to save money on power and cooling but, before an SMB can consider how power and cooling costs can be maintained or reduced, everyone has to have a solid understanding of how the data center consumes electricity. IT managers should lay out a power and cooling requirements list that includes: Data Center operational systems Operational systems include the data center room cooling elements (or the portion of a building wide system that is used by the data center), lighting, the UPS system, and critical IT loads which are all the power needed by IT equipment (servers, storage devices, etc.) Backup generators All data centers should have a backup power generator that kicks in during a power outage. Not only do backup generators allow companies to keep working, continuous power ensures that data is not corrupted with data servers suddenly power off. Backup generator requirements are determined by estimating the amount of power that s needed to run business critical systems those that can never go down or can t go down for more than several minutes. Expansion plans Data centers have a habit of growing. IDC recommends that IT managers assume 60% growth in business data year to year. New technologies like remote and mobile computing require enhanced processing power. New employees increase data center performance requirements. IT has to work with business units to estimate how the data center will have to grow to support business plans and then prescribe the power and cooling needed. The best way to decrease data center power and cooling expense is to reduce the number of things running the data center and the amount of space needed to house data center equipment. Both those metrics can be reduced by limiting the number of servers needed to support business operations. Servers immediately gain the spotlight as heavy consumers of data center power, cooling, and space. Servers release 100% of their input power as heat. The more powerful and high-performing the servers (the more CPUs), the more heat they will generate. Data centers have to control that heat in order to keep all equipment up and running. The more servers in the data center, the more airflow and cooling required to keep internal components from overheating. Along with fans and air conditioning units, airflow is essential for efficient cooling and space is needed for airflow. One way to create cooling airflow is to position servers back to back and front to front. This hot aisle/cold aisle configuration allows cooled air to circulate around each machine and eliminates very hot and very cold spaces. Many data centers also raised flooring so that cooled air can also run underneath server racks and other equipment. Floor space and flooring equipment also add costs to the data center cooling equation Dell and TechTarget

3 This all leads to a fairly obvious conclusion: the fewer servers in a data center, the lower the power and cooling costs. Since reducing the number of servers also reduces the size of the data center, space and lighting costs also decrease as do backup generator costs. For more help in determining your own data center requirements, refer to the Dell s configuration calculator. (link to en/config_calculator?c=us&cs=555&l=en&s=biz) The calculator considers a range of data center expenses but since servers represent the main cost in a data center, the focus in on estimating the number of servers needed and strategies for reducing that number. The strategy of choice for most IT and data center managers is server consolidation with Microsoft Hyper-V R2. How Microsoft Hyper-V R2 Reduces Power and Cooling Requirements and Your Utility Bill Company growth and server growth go hand in hand. As SMBs expand in terms of numbers of employees, numbers of customers, and amount of data that s generated and required by the business (think of prospect lists, financial records, legal agreements, customer data, product development and testing information, etc.), more servers are needed to host databases and applications. And as SMBs take greater advantage of sophisticated software applications, mobile computing, and other go-ahead technologies, server performance has to increase. IDC estimates that for every dollar IT spends on hardware to support new users and applications, they spend another 50 cents on power and cooling for all existing hardware. In other words, adding servers increases costs over the entire data center, not just the new equipment. That makes sense since the new equipment is increasing the overall temperature of the data center. How can data centers grow in order to support business growth without increasing costs? More and more, SMBs are turning to virtualization as a way to reduce the total number of physical servers needed to support and expand their business. Virtualization allows physical servers to be divided into multiple, independent server environments. Rather than running one application per server (one server for the accounting application, one for customer service, etc.) one physical server running virtualization software can run many applications. Many IT departments have reported 30 50% reductions in annual utility bills. Applying the widely used assumption that each server consumes about $2,400 per year ($200/ser/month) in energy costs, it s easy to see how reducing the number of servers in a data center could add up to significant savings. Just to drive the point home, consider a simple example. A company with 20 servers eliminates 14 of them through virtualization. It reduces its monthly power and cooling cost by $2,800. That s an annual savings of $33,600. How else might the company invest those dollars to increase profits? What other new technology could speed product development? How could online marketing investments bring in more prospects and customers? Microsoft Hyper-V R2, a market-leading virtualization solution, enables multiple operating systems and applications to reside on a single physical server and scales processing power in order to reduce power and cooling requirements. With Microsoft Hyper-V R2 in place, companies experience the energy savings that are outlined above. Of course, servers that run Hyper-V R2 still require Dell and TechTarget

4 power and they still generate heat. The cost savings come from two things: a reduction in the number of servers in the data center and the built-in energy efficiency that comes from scaling. While the power and cooling benefits of virtualization are obvious, it s important to point out that those cost savings are added to by: reducing the amount of square footage required by the data center enabling easy load balancing between virtual servers This is especially beneficial for scalability. IT managers are able to easily shift loads from server to server to keep every machine fully utilized. migration of applications from server to server This is important for disaster recovery and business continuity. The easy movement of applications and data across physical servers in virtual environments means that the loss of a machine is easily compensated by other servers with spare capacity. lower IT overhead With fewer servers to manage (upgrade, repair, etc.) and fewer software licenses to track, IT staff frees up time for other strategic projects. elimination of underutilized, single purpose servers It s inefficient to fill growing data centers with servers that do one thing for small portions of the day. Single-purpose servers are loaded with processor and memory resources that go unused. Not only do those servers take up space even when idle, they generate heat even when idle. Virtualization with Microsoft Hyper-V R2 results in significant IT savings. Taking advantage of all the cost-savings, particularly power and cooling benefits, afforded by virtualization requires implementing a software/hardware combination that maximizes its advantages. Dell servers with Intel Xeon processors are designed for virtualization providing the both the performance and reliability required for SMB data centers. They also add to cost-savings with energy efficiency features that cut power and cooling requirements for virtual servers. Creating an Energy Efficient Data Center with Dell Servers and Intel Processors Data centers are significantly reducing their power and cooling costs through server consolidation. Using Microsoft Hyper-V R2, they run multiple applications on a single server (rather than one application per server) saving them on the power it takes to run machines and cool them down. Server consolidation also generates savings in space rental, IT management overhead, and software licenses. Gaining all those financial benefits requires a hardware platform that fully supports consolidation through virtualization. A Dell PowerEdge R710 server with an Intel Xeon processors running Microsoft Hyper-V R2 and Windows Server 2008 is able to replace 7 older, single-purpose servers. A company with 70 servers could consolidate down to 10 and be able to run the same fleet of applications much more efficiently. They would use less power to run 10 servers. They would use less energy to cool 10 servers. And, the servers they were powering and cooling would be more fully utilized; they would not be paying to power and cool unused resources Dell and TechTarget

5 Single applications typically use a small portion maybe 10% of a server s processor capacity. There is a lot of power going to unused resources. Total efficiency requires 100% of a server s processor capacity to be used. Since virtual servers run multiple applications, they get much closer to that fully utilized mark. (It s important to maintain some free capacity so that applications from a server that has failed or is being serviced can be temporarily migrated to a functioning server.) It s much more efficient to power and cool 10 servers that are running at 60% of capacity than 70 servers that are running at only 10% of capacity. Savings from virtualization are so compelling that Garter predicts 60 80% of companies around the world have deployed some level of virtualization. The Dell/Intel solution adds to those savings through server hardware and processor features that further reduce power and cooling environments. Energy efficiency features of Dell PowerEdge R710 servers include: Energy efficient power supplies The more efficiently the power support converts alternating current to direct current, the less power it uses. The power supplies inside Dell R710 servers are more than 90% efficient. Intelligent management system In most servers, fans run at a constant speed no matter what the temperature of the server. PowerEdge R710 fans automatically speed up or slow down in accordance with the internal temperature of the server. If the server is cool, the fan slows down or turns off, saving energy. Power capping Servers use as much energy as allowed. IT managers are able to cap the power consumed by PowerEdge R710 servers to conserve a set numbers of watts. Low voltage memory modules Next to the CPU, memory uses the most energy of any server component. PowerEdge R710 servers use low voltage memory modules to reduce memory power requirements. Smart chassis design Good air flow through the server reduces the cooling that has to come from internal fans or external air conditioning. The chassis design of PowerEdge R710 servers includes shrouds that full air over and through critical elements and high efficiency heat sinks that allow heat to be easily funnel outside. The Intel Xeon 5600 series processors inside PowerEdge R710 servers also provide power and cooling benefits beyond those that are realized through virtualization. Not only does this next generation of multi-core processors reduce energy consumption, they more than meet the high performance requirements of virtual environments. Intel Xeon 5600 series processors offer up to 40% better performance per watt than previous generation processors which translates into 95% lower operating costs. Intel Xeon 5600 series processors achieve high levels of performance and savings through: Intel Turbo Boost Technology Server performance is automatically maximized by increasing core frequencies which enables faster speeds for either specific threads or very heavy workloads. Intel Intelligent Power Technology The processor and memory don t always need the same amount of power. Intel Intelligent Power Technology automatically shifts both Dell and TechTarget

6 CPU and memory to the lowest power state that still delivers the performance required. That not only saves on energy used to run the server but reduces the heat output which, in turns, reduces cooling requirements. Automated energy efficiency Idling cores (those that are not needed to support current workloads) are powered down to near zero consumption independently of working cores to reduce overall power consumption. Automated low-power states Processor, memory, and I/O controllers are automatically reduced to the power state that will support performance needed by the current workload. Intel processors are also designed to assist virtual environments. Virtual data center environments are able to migrate overnight or weekend workloads (data processing, back up, etc.) to fewer servers in order to significantly reduce off-hour power consumption. Before the workday begins, those processes are migrated back across a greater number of servers to accommodate higher daytime performance needs. With the right hardware support, virtual server environments offer significant power and cooling benefits while they increase performance. Configuration and deploying a virtual server platform to the greatest advantage often requires technical expertise. Dell consultants are able to specify servers that meet the current and business expansion requirement of any SMB. They are experienced with Hyper-V R2 deployment and, working with Dell technicians, can have servers configured, tested, and shipped for out-of-the box implementation. Taking advantage of implementation services helps SMBs immediately cut power and cooling costs. It is certainly possible to deploy virtualization software like Microsoft Hyper-V R2 on older servers that are already in place. It is probable that rates of consolidation would be much lower than 7:1. It is definite that there would not be the full power and cooling benefit that is available through a Dell/Intel server solution. Deploying Microsoft Hyper-V R2 on Dell servers that were designed for virtualization and packed with their own energy efficiency measures ensures that data centers are wringing the most savings out of their utility bill while significantly increasing data center capacity and performance. Virtualization starts that job. Dell servers with Intel processors finish it Dell and TechTarget