Michael Harding
Sr. Product Marketing Manager

In Part 1 of Greening Your IT Effort I talked about ways to reduce energy consumption with data center and hardware changes. This TechTip focuses on how software can help you take a lead role within your company to reduce energy requirements. Types of software that reduce energy needs include virtualization, automated storage tiering, data de-duplication, clustering, advanced workload management, and desktop management.

The right software can provide multiple benefits when it comes to reducing energy use as well as costs. First, it can reduce hardware requirements, and the related energy consumption. This in turn reduces the heat in the data center, and the load on your HVAC systems. Finally, you'll realize labor and maintenance cost savings from having less hardware to administer. Let's look at some major categories of software and how they can help you "green" your IT effort.

Classes of Software that deliver Greener IT

1. Virtualization: Server Virtualization is a hot topic, thanks to the publicity surrounding one of last year's most successful IPO's, VMware. Virtualization helps you increase server utilization by pooling applications onto fewer physical servers. This allows you to either decommission unused servers, or more typically, defer new server purchases.
   
   
2. Advanced Clustering: New approaches to system clustering provide high availability with fewer standby servers. In the past, failover protection required a dedicated standby for every operational system, but advanced clustering software now lets you cluster many systems that leverage a single 'roaming spare.' This configuration is known as 'n+1' clustering. Another option is to have multiple systems draw on the resources of multiple backups, even if those systems are already handling some other workload—a configuration called n+m clustering. Either approach allows for server consolidation, increasing overall utilization and reducing hardware and energy needs.
   
   
3. Dynamic storage tiering: This is an advanced Storage Resource Management capability that lets data move across different tiers of storage in response to data characteristics and environmental criteria. It achieves two important objectives. First, it increases storage utilization by connecting otherwise separate "islands" of storage, improving end-to-end visibility of all storage assets, and identifying unclaimed storage. Second, it shifts data automatically from high-end, operational arrays down to near-store or archival devices. Dynamic storage tiering also allows you to utilize different classes of storage hardware, which yields power savings.
   
   
4. Data deduplication: Traditional backup methodologies have some companies backing up the same data 20 times or more. Similarly, multiple copies of the same email can end up being stored in many different places, such as personal folders, servers running Microsoft Exchange, file storage, etc. Deduplication software, however, can reduce or eliminate duplicated data along with the need for all the storage hardware to hold it. Using deduplication during backup, along with single instance message storage, can reduce disk space usage and also cut bandwidth needed for backups by 50x–500x.
   
   
5. Desktop management: This type of software provides better control over desktop power usage than is possible with the power management features typically supplied with operating systems or hardware. Desktop management software simplifies the power-down of idle desktops, and automates power settings. This is especially important across distributed, global enterprises with thousands of desktops and devices.
   
   
6. Application Performance management: IT organizations often over-provision server and storage hardware to solve performance problems. There's another alternative: by using Application Performance management software, IT administrators can automate the process of identifying and addressing performance bottlenecks. That allows for optimally tuning databases and applications, which can improve performance 30 to 95 percent without adding or upgrading hardware.

Using software is a great approach to greening your IT effort. It can provide fast time-to-value—and a compelling return on investment.

Related Links

Article: Advanced Cluster Server Solutions in a Nutshell, by Minakshi Sehgal

Article: XML Guide for Dynamic Storage Tiering (DST), by Marianne Lent

Article: Global Data Deduplication, by Peter Elliman and Stefaan Vervaet

Article: The Symantec i³ Add-on AppTier,  by Mike Harding

Podcast: Symantec i³ v8.0 with Mike Harding

Blog: EnGauge: The Blog for Enterprise Application Performance and Availability