When It Comes To Data Center Management, Don’t Forget Utilization

Utilization has become a rallying cry of sorts for us here at Viridity. We have so many conversations with data center personnel who need to improve their energy management strategies. They talk about PUE ratios and cooling costs, about server efficiency and virtualization, about high-efficiency transformers and PDUs.

We talk about utilization.

Here’s why. The lion’s share of a typical data center’s budget goes to servers—to powering them and then to cooling them. That EPA report everyone likes to reference broke down the numbers. When you look specifically at the distribution of power—which, incidentally, takes up to 50 percent of data center operating expenses—servers (powering and cooling) account for 80 percent of the total balance. Another 10 percent goes to storage, and 10 percent to networking and other equipment. Cooling costs are factored in here. About half of your power expenses go into cooling down what the IT equipment heated up. The bottom line is that, today, most of your power budget is really all about powering servers.

That being said, servers have evolved into much more flexible, efficient machines than they were just a few years ago. (Yes, they’re more efficient and still incredible energy hogs. Both. Maybe that’s a conversation for another day.) Current server technology has borrowed advancements from mobile devices. And why not? The developers of laptops (and iPads! Love my iPad!) have been so innovative in terms of extending their battery capacity—not to mention their sleek look. Now computer chips are smart and dynamic about power utilization. They modify their power consumption depending on their job.

Essentially, these computers know how to kick themselves into low gear power-wise when they aren’t doing much work. Then they crank up on power consumption commensurate with the amount of work they do. This is good news, but don’t underestimate what it means for energy management. These servers can suddenly double or even triple their power draw depending on utilization. If you’re spending almost 80 percent of your energy dollars—almost half of your entire operating budget—providing power to servers that fluctuate so dramatically, you have to monitor utilization. No other indicator impacts energy management so directly. Not by a long shot.

Put another way, if such a huge chunk of your energy budget goes into powering machines that vary their consumption rate by as much as 200 percent depending on use, can you afford to underestimate the correlation between power and utilization?

There it is, utilization. If you don’t understand utilization and its relationship to power, you don’t understand power.

-- Michael Rowan, Viridity Software Co-founder and CTO

Data Center Efficiency Is More Practical Than Altruistic

Viridity Software is a green technology, so you might imagine that the inspiration for our company was to help data centers be environmentally correct. And you’d be right; that was part of it. At Viridity Software, we try to be environmentally correct. (You will find a few SUVs in our employee parking lot, and I have seen the cleaning crew use bleach to clean the bathrooms.) But truth be told, the inspiration for us at Viridity was more practical than altruistic. Green tech is often labeled as expensive--its implementation difficult and inconsistent with existing infrastructure.

Our path couldn’t be more different. We’re all for the greater good. But our motivation with Viridity has really always been about solving business problems—specifically about data center efficiency. 

Prior to co-founding Viridity Software, I was hired as a consultant for a software company that worked closely with the data centers of large Wall Street companies. I was actually working on a storage project in a data center; we really had nothing to do with data center efficiency or energy resource management.

Still, you couldn’t help but notice the chaos running amuck at these organizations. For the guys in IT, it was all about business applications. On the facilities’ side, it was all about where to put them. Too often, IT had no idea of the strain inflicted on the data center with the addition of new computers and applications. At the same time, data center operators had only vague notions about available remaining energy at their sites. They couldn’t really tell you how close they were to running out of power. Sometimes, the whole enterprise seemed to be hanging by a thread.

Ultimately, all that inefficiency—coupled with communication breakdowns—has to catch up with a business. And it did. At one of those very large Wall Street data centers, the IT department put in a requisition for $25 million in new storage arrays—a significant investment, but certainly worth it from a business standpoint. So the requisition was approved, and the equipment was ordered, purchased, and delivered.  It wasn’t until after the arrays were actually installed on the data center floor that someone said, “You know, you can’t actually plug those puppies in, there isn’t enough power….”  

Data and business systems were clearly the dominant concern here--energy less so. Until they ran out of power. No one checked with the data center, which already ran beyond capacity. That $25 million investment sat there on the data center floor, quietly not doing anything useful but annoy people, indefinitely. Rockin’ good use of dough.

Suddenly, energy resource management became a huge concern at the site. To make room for the new arrays, our group switched focus and spent the next six months chasing down and analyzing applications and hardware from an energy-demand standpoint, trying to figure out what applications we could move to other data centers to make room on the grid for the arrays. Unfortunately, we never made much headway. The data center maintained such a tangled collection of applications and servers and racks from different providers that the discovery process was next to impossible. We left before the job was finished. I wonder sometimes if those arrays were ever powered on ;-)  

What kills me is that this is not some isolated situation. It’s common. When I talk to clients and analysts about Viridity, I always bring up that story. It’s such a vivid anecdote about the need for energy resource management tools, and the connection between IT and facilities that it demands. And every time I bring it up, the response from customers is the same. I get a familiar nod of recognition. It seems data centers everywhere face the same problem. They need tools to make better use of the energy they have and to make informed business decisions. 

Green is the gravy.  

-- Michael Rowan, Co-founder and CTO, Viridity Software

Measuring Impact of Virtualization on Data Center Energy Efficiency

In several recently published articles a recent Forrester Green IT study has been referenced suggesting that the biggest opportunities to bring green IT into the conversation surround server virtualization in the data center. At Viridity Software, we are closely aligned with server virtualization.

Server virtualization technology has been in commercial production environments since the mainframe days. Contemporary server virtualization (over the past five years) has been driven by the explosive deployment of “industry standard” or x86 servers resulting in server sprawl. This coupled with VMware entering the market with technology that allows for multiple “virtual servers” to be configured on a single physical server has led to a major transformation in how IT equipment, x86 servers in particular, are deployed, configured and maintained in the data center.

Viridity EnergyCenter plays a key role in the x86 server virtualization ecosystem which include:

• Planning for Virtualization – Viridity EnergyCenter helps you identify consolidation candidates based on utilization & power consumption
• Designing for Virtualization – Viridity EnergyCenter helps you understand how “motion” (moving workloads from one server cluster to another) will impact utilization and consumption to avoid outages or wasted capacity. This allows you to increase density without creating power and cooling issues (referered to as “hot spots”.)
• Optimizing for Virtual Environments – Viridity EnergyCenter monitors utilization and power consumption at the virtual machine or “guest” level which helps you to understand the power implications of virtual machine sprawl.
• Measuring Virtualization Results – Viridity EnergyCenter will benchmark your data center utilization and power consumption performance before and after virtualization deployments at the device, rack, row or data center level.

As with all disruptive technologies, server virtualization offers tons of benefits. When it comes time to improve energy efficiency in the data center, server virtualization definitely plays a key role. But at the end of the day, the old cliché “You cannot improve what you cannot measure” requires an application to measure the before and after to truly quantify the reduction in consumption and realize the benefits.

Marty Stephens of LexisNexis on Managing Data Center Energy with Viridity Software

Today, Michael Rowan, CTO & Co-Founder of Viridity Software, and Marty Stephens, Director of Information Technology of LexisNexis Risk Solutions, discussed how Viridity EnergyCenter software helped LexisNexis Risk Solutions improve energy efficiency and lowered their power bill.

Marty, who manages Critical Infrastructure for the LexisNexis RAIG Alpharetta Data Center, currently has a Tier III+ data center with plans to become a Tier IV data center by the end of 2010. His data center supports an annual revenue stream of over a billion dollars. Prior to using Viridity EnergyCenter software, LexisNexis Risk Solutions was able to cut $1 million by getting rid of useless servers in their data center – but that was by putting a team on project managers working extra hours on the project. “We could have done the whole project with the push of a button if we had started with Viridity EnergyCenter.” Marty went on to say that he can take the information he gets from using Viridity EnergyCenter in his data center, directly to other IT managers, Facility managers, and C-level executives to justify the immediate ROI of the software when he shows the power savings gained with a more efficiently run data center. “Every dollar saved in the data center is a dollar in the bank for my company,” he says.

Viridity Software Presents Data Center Energy Resource Management Best Practices

In a recent survey of data center managers, Viridity Software learned that 48% of data center managers don’t know how they are measuring the power used within their data center. At the same time, 16% of data center managers are concerned with the increasing cost of power while another 10% are concerned with running out of power all together.

 

We reviewed the survey results and discussed data center energy resource management best practices with IT managers in a recent webinar. If you'f interested in learning what we presented, take a look at the slides below.

Viridity Software Selected as a Red Herring Top 100 North America Tech Startup

Red Herring announced its Top 100 award in recognition of the leading private companies from North America, celebrating these startups’ innovations and technologies across their respective industries and Viridity Software, the leader in energy resource management solutions, is one of the award winners.

Red Herring’s Top 100 North America list has become a mark of distinction for identifying promising new companies and entrepreneurs. Red Herring editors were among the first to recognize that companies such as Facebook, Twitter, Google, Yahoo, Skype, Salesforce.com, YouTube, and eBay would change the way we live and work. 

“Choosing the companies with the strongest potential was by no means a small feat,” said Alex Vieux, publisher and CEO of Red Herring. “After rigorous contemplation and discussion, we narrowed our list down from hundreds of candidates from across North America to the Top 100 Winners. We believe Viridity Software embodies the vision, drive and innovation that define a successful entrepreneurial venture. Viridity Software should be proud of its accomplishment, as the competition was very strong.”

Red Herring’s editorial staff evaluated the companies on both quantitative and qualitative criteria, such as financial performance, technology innovation, management quality, strategy, and market penetration. This assessment of potential is complemented by a review of the track record and standing of startups relative to their sector peers, allowing Red Herring to see past the “buzz” and make the list a valuable instrument of discovery and advocacy for the most promising new business models in North America.

It Was a Big Week for Data Center Energy News

There was a lot of interesting news on data center energy this week.  Here's a look at some of the articles that caught our attention.

DatacenterDynamics ran a nice piece on how the rising cost and demand for energy in the data center combined with impending government legislation means energy efficiency metrics are taking hold and evolving at a rapid pace.

SearchDataCenter News ran an article by Robert McFarlane on the new EnergyStar ratings for data centers.  In the article, he points out that the new Energy Star rating will have its detractors because it is based on the already controversial PUE (power usage efficiency) which is becoming the global standard for measuring data center efficiency.  He points out, the metric is "not valid as a comparison among different data centers" and that the problem with PUE is that it looks only at how much energy is used and not how that energy usage is contributing the business. 

Melissa Alvarez blogged about The Three Biggest Myths About Green IT. The first myth is that the case for Green IT is a clear one.  She writes that "the biggest problem in making the case for energy efficiency has nothing to do with the technology. The issue is who realizes the benefits."  The second myth is that Green IT is achievable.  Her thinking here is that Green IT isn't so much a destination as a journey that involves creating processes and policies that define a way of operating over the long-term.  And the third myth is that everybody cares about Green IT.  She quotes the results of a recent survey from CIO magazine that asked IT management their top priorities where Green IT didn't make the list.  Her thinking is that "Green IT is really about doing away with waste and inefficiency -- and inefficiency costs money."

At Viridity Software, we believe that you can't manage what you can't measure.  It's great to read that energy efficiency metrics are taking hold across the industry and that people recognize that reducing data center energy usage benefits the whole organization.

Join Us on The Road to Data Center Energy Efficiency

Lack of available power along with the energy expenses associated with IT equipment and cooling infrastructure has heightened the requirement for data center energy efficiency. Until now, it’s been difficult to successfully improve energy usage and gain visibility into hardware power usage because of the cost and complexity involved in gathering actionable information. Recently, Viridity Software’s Co-Founder and CTO, Michael Rowan explained how to get started on the road to data center energy efficiency. He discussed how to eliminate non-productive devices; optimize power and cooling; and how to optimize the data center to tie IT to the business.  Here's the presentation.

The Road to Data Center Energy Efficiency

View more presentations from Viridity Software.

Meet the Author of "The Green and Virtual Data Center"

Industry veteran Greg Schulz has written a great book called The Green and Virtual Data Center and we liked it so much, we invited him to do a webinar with us in July. (Stay tuned for details.)

Greg explains how data centers can use many of the technologies that exist now that allow  a green and efficient virtual data center to support and sustain business growth with reasonable return on investment.

Throughout the book, Greg offers his real-world insight in addressing best practices, server, software, storage, networking, and facilities issues concerning any current or next-generation virtual data centers. This book covers:

• Energy as well as data footprint reduction
• Cloud-based storage and computing
• Intelligent and adaptive power management
• Server, storage, and networking virtualization
• Tiered servers; storage, network, and data centers
• Energy avoidance and energy efficiency

We hope you can join Greg Schulz and Michael Rowan, Viridity Software's co-founder and CTO for the webinar.  We'll be giving away copies of The Green and Virtual Data Center to two attendees.  The live webinar will include a presentation by Greg, a demo of Viridity EnergyCenter by Mike, and will be open for Q&A afterwards.

>> Register for Webinar

About the Book:

• Hardcover: 396 pages (coming soon to the Amazon Kindle)
• Publisher: CRC/Auerbach Publications; January 26, 2009
• Language: English (but soon to be out in Chinese)

Top Ten Reasons to Use Energy Resource Management Software