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back head in neck painEnergy consumption in data centres is fast becoming a serious issue. An IDC finding last year states that 10 years ago, a typical server only required 100 watts of power to run.
An average server today consumes four times as much. It also said, the cost to power up a server will exceed the cost of the actual server itself — by next year. To large corporations which own data centres, higher power consumption means increased costs. "According to IDC, data centre energy consumption currently makes up about 10% of most companies' IT budgets. "It's the second biggest cost after maintenance and administration," said Ajaz Munsiff, director of products and solutions at information management and storage vendor EMC Computer Systems South Asia Pte Ltd. According to the company, a large data centre will take anything from five to 10 megawatts of power per month to run. This is equivalent to burning 66 tonnes of coal a day. Data centres house computer servers and rely quite heavily on air-conditioning systems to keep the machines from overheating. "The reason it is expensive to maintain data centres is because most of the equipment is old," Ajaz said. "As time goes by, a company may add more and more services as well as applications to a data centre — and usually without prior planning," he said. "Because of this, every time a company needs to expand its business, it goes out to buy more servers to maintain its increasing data," he said. To add to the problem, the growth rate of data is also increasing. IDC projects a six-fold annual information growth from last year to the end of this decade. The size of digital data in 2006 amounted to 161 billion gigabytes, which is three million times the content of all books that were ever written in the world. "EMC is seeing infrastructure for storage grow at 80% per annum," said Sal Fernando, EMC Software Asia Pacific and Japan chief technical architect. Agreeing with Ajaz, he said that companies tend to add more hardware as a solution to cope with increasing information demands. "Instead of adding more servers every time you add more services, why not look at how you can better manage with what you already have?" he said. Tackling energy issues Fernando said EMC and networking equipment vendor Cisco Systems Inc have joined hands to tackle the issue with "greener" data centres. The solution? A smart approach to data management with a combination of the information lifecycle management (ILM) strategy and VMware server virtualisation software. The ILM strategy basically prioritises data according to how important and valuable it is with respect to an organisation's priorities at a given moment. "If a company can monitor when a certain application or service requires resources, it can do load balancing," said Andre Smit, Cisco Asia Pacific managing director of data centre sales. "Our solution allows the network to treat the data environment as a whole, regardless of the physical infrastructure, and knows when to automatically allocate resources to where and when it is needed," he said. For example, he said, a company like Dell Inc, which receives orders through its website, would experience different periods of the day where more orders come in. Instead of overloading its servers when orders peak and letting them remain idle when web traffic lessens, it would make more sense to handle its resources with load balancing, Smit said. Over provisioning According to Fernando, most customers also over provision for worse case scenarios. "When they need one server, they tend to buy four — the main server, one for testing, one to test for disaster and recovery and another one for disaster recovery!" he quipped. "But when you are able do monitoring, then you'll know whether you need more servers and exactly how many," Smit added. He said, Cisco provides its Wide Area Application Services (WAAS), which enables applications to be served to remote users just as it was from a local area network. "The WAAS, a module which sits inside your network switch, is able to replicate the functions of a server — it can cache data and offload it to a local engine," he said. The trick also lies in the VMware server virtualisation software, Ajaz added. "Virtualisation enables companies to consolidate their hardware into one system," he said. High density In addition, EMC encourages the use of high-density drives, which consume the same amount of energy as lower density drives, said Ajaz. "Unlike our competitors, EMC also allows our customers to mix and match different drive types for better performance and power efficiency," he said. The company even provides a tool to calculate power consumption. "Before a customer buys any machine or hardware, they can use the web-based tool to find out how much power that configuration will consume," Ajaz said. He said large corporations, assuming that they maintain large data centres, would most likely experience the most significant effect from power consumption issues. "The smaller companies may not feel the pinch yet, but sooner or later, they will. "In 2006, the global electricity cost is already 20% more than the year before," Ajaz said. The solutions by EMC and Cisco can use up to 70% less energy, the companies claimed. "Information growth is continuous and we cannot stop that, but we can become smarter in how we manage our data," said Ajaz. He added that greener data centres also offer cost-savings as an incentive for businesses. "And as a by-product, companies can also live better knowing that they have helped contribute to a greener environment by conserving energy," he said.
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