“higher rises in fuel costs that have taken place over the last year
have seen electricity prices to the business go up substantially”
servers to access. This approach leads to higher utilisation and A good way to demonstrate how virtualisation can really impact
therefore more efficient IT, as well as potentially saving energy that power use is with a customer example. One organisation had a
would otherwise be wasted supporting unused storage. large number of physical servers which were underutilised, and
the data centre was approaching its capacity.
Another technology that is coming through in the storage realm
is thin provisioning. This is a virtualisation technique which means On top of this, the amount of power that the organisation was
organisations can fool applications into thinking that they have able to draw from the National Grid had reached its limit. Putting
more storage than they actually have. By using thin provisioning, any more servers into this environment would be a potential
organisations can implement the storage that they actually need risk, as services would be affected in the event of a power
rather than having to buy in everything at once. Thin provisioning failure.
also allows companies to save energy that would otherwise be
used to power disks that would not be used until near the end of By using virtualisation, the organisation was able to decrease the
a project. number of physical machines within the data centre, as well as
drastically cutting the amount of power needed. It also made the
Combining storage and server virtualisation together offers servers that remained work harder.
businesses more flexibility than a physical infrastructure can
provide. It also means that overall that a company sees more A physical server typically uses 1.2 amps of electricity while it
results from its investment in IT, compared to its investment in new is working. A VMware host uses around 2 amps because it is
hardware and power. working harder and its resources are being better utilised. At
this customer, they estimated that their data centre, containing
What can I expect from virtualisation? 170 physical servers, would use 686,000KWh over a year of
24x7 operation. In comparison, the organisation’s nine VMware
The results that virtualisation can deliver in terms of cost savings ESX Server machines used only 60,500KWh over the same
are substantial, and will only grow as the cost of power continues timeframe.
to go up. In 2007, VMware estimated that for every virtual machine
a company deploys, it saves about £330 in power and cooling The result of the organisation’s virtualisation project is that it
costs per year. Part of this is in straight power costs that are no saves over £43,000 and 269 tons of CO2 emissions per year.
longer required, but there is also a reduction in the amount of air It also requires less infrastructure such as switches, racks and
conditioning that is needed. With rising power costs in 2008, this network cards to support its operation, and therefore uses and
amount will also increase. disposes of less equipment over time.
47 | ecoexecutive
Virtualisation.indd 47 18/4/08 16:00:40
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