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Data Centers are the Hottest Thing in Town
The United States is going through another energy crisis. This time affecting more than just automobiles and heating homes, the crisis is bringing attention to the data center.
Congress is taking up the issue of energy efficiency; asking the Environmental Protection Agency to conduct a study on power consumption in data centers.
The EPA and several technology companies are looking toward creating a way of universally measuring or rating server power consumption.
One of the companies, AMD, recently commissioned a survey of nearly 1,200 organizations regarding power consumption and cooling in the data center and found that:
- 85 percent have tried to address these issues in a variety of ways
- 44 percent were able to supply more power to the data center
- 27 percent consolidated servers
- 25 percent reorganized their servers into hot-aisle/cool-aisle configurations
- 23 percent increased the size of their data centers
Immediate Fixes
As IT organizations are asked to "do more with less," server consolidation is one way to cool off the thermometer-popping data center conundrum.
With server consolidation, IT organizations should look for software that ensures performance remains within acceptable levels after a consolidation project is completed. The capacity planner needs to verify a proposed server consolidation scenario to ensure that queues in the consolidated server remain low and that performance isn’t degraded for any of the co-hosted workloads.
Without touching a single piece of hardware, capacity planners can use a metric called stretch factor that will help discover whether a proposed server consolidation project is feasible in terms of potential resource queuing that may occur.
Virtualization also allows IT organizations to consolidate servers. When using virtualization for server consolidation projects, companies experience significant cost savings while improving manageability, decreasing floor space, and increasing flexibility in supporting business objectives.
Operational needs met through server consolidation/virtualization:
- Data center space
- Power consumption
- Cable management
- Ease of use and replacement
Before consolidating, IT organizations must understand their environment, the technology, and properly map out their needs. Without this, an organization could experience unnecessary downtime and huge monetary costs.
Driving the Need for Consolidation
Data centers are the centerpiece of IT operations. And according to research firm IDC, data centers are becoming more utilized, denser and hotter; which means decreased energy efficiency and smaller devices radiating more heat.
Data center operation challenges cited by independent research network TheInfoPro include:
- Power requirements
- Space considerations
- Cooling requirements
- Heat output
TheInfoPro's server study showed that server consolidation is the top priority for server professionals because they’re being pushed to achieve greater efficiencies and lower costs, which makes consolidation a natural choice. The same study cited power and energy posing as the greatest challenges for server professionals.
More than 40 percent of the professionals polled reported that consolidation is their top priority, while more than 20 percent reported that virtualization is a top priority.
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