Checklist: 12 Steps to a Greener Datacenter

Transcription

1 IT managers and executives can improve operating efficiency and lower costs by using environmentally concious techniques. Checklist: 12 Steps to a Greener Datacenter This 12-part checklist leads you through the basic stages of moving to a green datacenter. While this is often considered mostly a marketing move, or one that might as well be done since it probably won t cost much, it is in fact a pragmatic and cost-effective business decision that can save an organization with a large datacenter hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. Here are the 12 steps to saving money with a green datacenter: 1. IT Inventory and Infrastructure Review The first step in any project for which you are proposing to create cost savings, eliminate waste, optimize performance and increase efficiency is to know precisely what you do have. There are several reasons for this. Clear inventory helps you understand what equipment is necessary, what is optional and what is completely redundant. It also sets a baseline so that you can understand from what position you are making changes. This will help in performance, monitoring and determining the real ROI (return on investment) of the project. This needs to be a two-part review. Besides a careful inventory of every server and its usage patterns, load and power consumption, you need to do the same for clients, switches, routers and any other power-consuming part of your network. Don t forget telephony equipment if it s using the IP network. 2. Physical Facility and Operations Review Your IT operations are intimately connected to their physical environment. That means a thorough evaluation of your current system and future needs must include a facilities review. If you have multiple datacenters, reconsider whether you need them. The converse is also true. You may be worse off having one giant power-sucking datacenter than a few low-use centers located physically close to their principal users. You also need to evaluate the power supply and heating and cooling systems. The supply needs to be the right size to avoid brownouts, and heating and cooling systems are intimately connected to the operational health of your IT equipment. Copyright 2008, Tippit, Inc., All Rights Reserved

2 These last points lead to the need for an operations review. Does your IT operations team coordinate and cooperate with your physical plant operations team and vice versa? They need to. If IT anticipates a surge in server traffic and usage maybe even a rapid deployment and provisioning of new servers do they know enough to contact physical operations and make sure wiring, power and cooling requirements can be met in the same time frame? 3. IT-Operations Need Analysis Now that you have a thorough understanding of your current state of your datacenter and related operations, you are ready for the next step: Evaluate what you need. Not just what you need now, but what you need for a reasonable period of the future. You should make immediate plans for the next year, project usage for three years and even consider your needs five years down the road. This lets you avoid costly mistakes in failing to allow enough headroom for growth, which could lead to ripping out and replacing equipment in as little as three years. To avoid this, you need to survey business and IT stakeholders and ask them to project their IT needs a year, three years and five years into the future. You will want to immediately build your new, more efficient datacenter to solve the needs of the business a year from now. Make sure that you also allow for the projected changes in three years. Don t forget to consider usage patterns, such as time-based usage and peaks and lows. Even if you expect to make substantial savings through consolidation, you have to allow for enough bandwidth, processing power and storage to handle peak network traffic. 4. Facility and Physical-Operation Needs Analysis Now that you have some idea of IT equipment needs and expected median, peak and low usage patterns, you need to make sure that the physical plant will operate effectively with your IT equipment. That means looking at locations, wiring, physical configuration, power supply and heating and cooling systems. You also need to make sure that you do not under- or overprovision any part of your operation.

3 5. Prioritize and Optimize Usage Patterns Underneath the marketing hype, going green is a solid business practice. But for it to be a successful practice, it needs to be planned, optimized and managed. The next step to success is optimizing your operations. To get this right you need a clear understanding of how IT and business operations are prioritized and how all the different parts of your network are used to handle these business and IT applications. Once you have a clear understanding of the expected operations and applications, their usage patterns and their priority, you can optimize your IT practices to deliver them effectively. Ideally, you will have your network working optimally as much as possible. In reality, you will need to be able to guarantee good performance for the peak utilization periods without leaving too much of your equipment running idle during the lows. 6. Consolidate: Eliminate Redundancies and/or Unused Equipment and Infrastructure Up to this point, moving to a green datacenter may have seemed like an academic or theoretical exercise, but now the real value of the preceding work comes into play. Every single area in which you can consolidate, eliminate duplication, remove redundancy and flat out get rid of unused equipment becomes an area where you make concrete bottom-line savings to your operations. In organizations where employees have been able to add to networks without supervision or where there have been large changes in organizational structure and operations, the savings at this stage can be substantial. Don t forget to document clearly the changes and to count power savings in your ROI, as well as any capital equipment and ongoing operational cost savings. 7. Virtualization At this point in the project you can start to take advantage of new technologies. Virtualization is a powerful tool that can eliminate redundancies and unused bandwidth, storage and processing cycles by allowing one set of equipment to serve multiple roles. This is particularly valuable in an environment where usage levels change continually and where the system design has included virtualization as part of the planning.

4 8. Time- and Usage-Based Provisioning One of the common misconceptions with networking equipment, particularly servers, is that power cycling is bad for the equipment and that servers need to remain on 24/7 regardless of usage levels. In fact, several studies have shown that in tests modern servers can handle power cycling easily, and in hundreds of thousands of power cycles not one failure occurred. This means that smart IT managers plan to use one of the WakeOnLAN-type technologies available for coping with peak usage and enjoy considerable power savings as a result. In addition, this type of technology combined with a smart provisioning manager and good virtualization technology allows a network to adapt and adjust to rapidly changing loads. These technologies illustrate why it is so important that a thorough priority usage analysis over time is made for the datacenter. If that is done correctly, then this stage of the process can yield as many savings as the consolidation stage. 9. Upgrades You can t avoid equipment upgrades when implementing a project of this scope. It is even possible that if no such analysis has been done for several years, a complete rip and replacement may be necessary. Before that happens though, be sure to do a full audit and ROI analysis to make sure that a gradual change might not be a better plan. Datacenter, network and server technologies improve constantly. Some of the technologies you may wish to upgrade to include blade servers, virtualization, dynamic provisioning, smart power monitoring, new speedstep technologies from Intel Corp. and AMD Inc. that speed up and slow down processors to match demand, power use, WakeOnLAN and others. 10. Working Practices This may be the single most important change introduced in this process. It is common for physical plants and IT departments to start out separately and then figure out ways to work together. However, for the modern datacenter you really need to formalize the working relationship in some way. The same is true for telephony ; for historical reasons, the telephony engineers are often separate from IT, which should no longer be the case.

5 In addition, an operations group needs to also liaise with the regular business operations to make sure that there is clear and swift communication about all forms of change from outages to upgrades to communicating sudden business operation changes that could require significant datacenter support. 11. Monitoring Once the new datacenter is in place, it should be monitored extensively. Monitoring and reporting allow IT managers to accurately measure the effectiveness of change. They also allow operations to do a significantly better job at running the new datacenter, which can in turn save considerable amounts in terms of power consumption. 12. Disposal and Recycling of Old Equipment This last item is an often neglected part of moving to a green datacenter and even more often neglected are the cost advantages of doing this the right way. Just disposing of equipment without thought can lead to environmental consequences, fees and paying someone to take the equipment off your hands. But even donating it can be a cost saving allowing for a tax write-off if the donation can be a charitable one and at least saving the disposal fees if not. In addition, older equipment can be valuable. It is always worth looking for a buyer before even donating or throwing equipment away.

6 For more information about Green IT, please see the Green IT Resource Center on ITManagement.com at Here are some other resources for green datacenters: For any other information and advice you can always visit itmanagement.com/ or call one of our analysts on