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Rising energy costs and consumption in datacenters is a hot topic, whether you care about saving money, deploying new IT services, keeping the datacenter running or sparing the environment. As energy climbs the list of corporate priorities, “Green IT" solutions are proliferating. Prioritizing potential fixes is not easy amidst this flood of information. There is no silver bullet, but virtualization often tops the list because it right-sizes the largest culprits of energy over-consumption – underutilized x86 desktops and servers. In typical environments these machines sit idle almost all of the time, consuming significant amounts of power. VMware solutions help customers safely consolidate these machines onto much less hardware, both through initial consolidation efforts and dynamically as computing requirements change. This white paper explains how innovations in virtualization technology from VMware provide a foundation for a dramatically more efficient and greener IT environment.
Servers Are Driving Energy Consumption and Costs
Today’s datacenters consume a lot of electricity. A recent report by the Environmental Protection Agency claims datacenters in the U.S. consume 4.5 billion kWh annually, 1.5 percent of the country’s total.
Perhaps more importantly, this figure has doubled from 2000 to 2006, and is likely to double again in the next few years. This trend is affecting datacenters around the world and is likely to continue, given how central computing is to our businesses and lifestyles.
There are many factors contributing to excessive energy consumption in datacenters, but underutilized x86 hardware is the most significant. According to the EPA, servers consumed 80 percent of the total IT load and 40% of total datacenter power consumption in 2006.ii Site infrastructure—including cooling of equipment—accounts for another 50 percent of total datacenter power consumption. Yet because x86 servers typically house only a single application, their processors sit idle 85-95 percent of the time. While sitting idle, these servers use nearly as much power as they do when they are active. According to analysts, companies maintain roughly three years of excess hardware capacity due to this vast underutilization. With more than seven million servers sold annually, this represents more than 20 million servers sitting idle and wasting energy. This inefficiency is not only wasteful but expensive, especially as electricity costs and computing demand continue to rise.
As a result of increasing energy demands on inefficient and aging datacenters, many companies are simply running out of power and/or capacity. Either the utility cannot provide adequate power, or the equipment is so power-hungry and dense that the datacenter runs out of capacity even though the datacenter is not physically full; energy costs preclude investments in additional physical hardware.Analyst firms and industry research suggest that most datacenters will feel the crunch soon, if they don’t already.
Another challenge is the inability of IT staff to respond rapidly to changing business needs and computing requirements. IT loads can vary depending on the time of day or month, and often grow over time as companies grow or the demand for applications increases. The static nature of a physical IT infrastructure makes it difficult to respond. Hardware is typically over-provisioned for peak load, because applications are very difficult to reconfigure to different hardware, once installed. For example, if a server is running an ERP application that has a spike in usage at the end of every month, the server must be sized to accommodate that peak in usage. In preparation for increased capacity requirements, businesses also maintain excess IT capacity. The inability to provision the physical infrastructure dynamically to accommodate these fluctuations leads to wasteful practices in the datacenter that increase energy consumption.
Businesses of all sizes are looking for relief from increasing energy demands and costs, as well as freedom from the constraints of inflexible and underutilized hardware. Many are turning to virtualization—a fundamental element of the green datacenter.
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