Green Virtualization

Controlling Power and Cooling Costs in the Data Center

The big picture is easy to see: It's the whole earth from space, stitched together from hundreds of satellite photographs by computer so that there's no cloud cover. There's no sign of human beings either and no national borders. Just blue, green, and brown, with white at the poles where there is ice¹.

The picture is not static:

Human beings are changing it every moment. Over the past 50 years, the evidence of a global warming trend is "unequivocal" concludes a February, 2007 report of a United Nations scientific panel. The release of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases from smokestacks, tailpipes, and burning forests has played a central role in raising the average surface temperature of the earth by more than one degree Fahrenheit since 1900. Human activity, the report states, has "very likely" been the driving force.

Evidence of this change is in the news almost every week: Weather patterns are more extreme; violent storms are more frequent. There is unusual flooding in some areas and extended drought in others.

Slowly, the white, the green, and the portion of the blue that represents drinkable water are shrinking. The brown is growing.

A major contributor to global warming is humanity's thirst for electrical power. The U.S. alone consumes 26 percent of the world's electricity, according to Solar Energy International, and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency reports that roughly 1.5 percent of total U.S. electricity, or about 60 billion kilowatt-hours in 2006, is consumed by data centers². With a growing appetite for IT services and more powerful chips, this has doubled in the past five years, according to the EPA, and it's expected to almost double again in the next five years.

Existing technologies and strategies could reduce typical data center energy use by an estimated 25 percent, resulting in savings of over one billion dollars a year. And even greater energy savings are possible with advanced technologies. A number of companies are already achieving such savings and doing their bit to help slow the changes occurring in the global environment.

How much can be saved?

Evan Jafa, chief technology officer for The First American Corporation, based in Santa Ana, California, needs a large mainframe environment and 4,300 servers to support the company's mission. First American is the nation's largest provider of business information in areas such as title insurance and services, specialty insurance, and mortgage and property information.

Jafa and his IT team have set out to reduce data center power consumption at First American by 25 percent, based on virtualization and efficient data center design.

Just down the road in San Diego, QUALCOMM, a leading developer of wireless communications products and services, realized that its data centers were consuming one megawatt-hour a year and would require 4 megawatt-hours annually within two years. There just wasn't enough power available in the San Diego area to fill that need.

The company now requires only 2 megawatt-hours. "We've saved $4 million in power costs for the past two years and another $13 million in hardware, software, and labor cost avoidance from virtualization," says Matt Clark, IT director at QUALCOMM. "We were going to have to build another data center, for instance, and now we don't have to. On the conservative side, that alone saves us about $3 million."

Symantec Corporation, based up north in Cupertino, California with more than 17,000 employees, is using several strategies to achieve "an 18 to 20 percent power reduction within three years," says CIO David Thompson. Savings are projected to be in the tens of millions of dollars and payback time is 20 months.

In Atlanta, Georgia, The Weather Channel CIO Brian Shields and his team are plotting a substantial power reduction. "We'd like to become the poster child of virtualization," he says. So how are these companies going about saving power and cooling costs in the data center? Here are their top strategies: