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As soon as it was out that Dataquest would be coming up with a story on green data centers, people started calling, emailing, and cajoling us to include them or their clients in the feature. Few stories in the recent past have created such an interest, especially before it was even penned.

This interest and attention got us thinking and we started working on the story with greater zeal and vigor. While much of the calls till now were from the vendor side, we decided to speak to a few CIOs on the subject as well. Not surprisingly, even CIOs seemed to be quite interested in going green. For the CIO community, the main issue was not the “green” as we often talk about (ecological, environment, etc) but the “green” as we love and cherish (namely the rupee and dollar). The challenges faced by the CIOs are two-fold-on one hand cut costs and on the other do more. They are virtually walking the tightrope. It is in this scenario that green becomes important and green data centers vital.

Power'full' Argument
End of December 2007, Dataquest had kicked off the coverage for green IT with a three-city event hosted in Mumbai, Bangalore, and Delhi. At all the three events, the participating CIOs from some of the most well known enterprises ranging from one of the biggest banks in India to a small call center discussed and debated on one thing-power, or, more precisely, electricity. Considering the erratic power supply in the country, where even metros are not spared from load-shedding, energy consumption is a big issue.

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To display the pattern of energy usage, Sandeep Nair, MD, Emerson Network Power India, shares a graph that displays the levels of energy consumed by the computing and the overheads in a typical data center.

According to Nair, the energy usage seems to be evenly split between computing (52%) and overheads (48%). “The growth in installation of blade servers and computing requirement is pushing the heal loads per rack to extreme density racks with heat loads to more than 15 kW/hrs, which is driving cooling challenges of data centers,” he says.

Ganesh Mahabala, regional director, India and Saarc, VMware, also touches upon cooling costs. “In a tropical country like India, companies mainly rely on air conditioning to keep servers at the right temperature. The more powerful the machine, the more cool air needed to keep it from overheating. Energy costs, now about 10% of the average IT budget, could rise to 50% in a matter of years unless companies take radical measures, and CIOs are well aware of this,” he says.

And not to forget, there is still a very valid environmental cost to it all, as Rajesh Saha, country manager, Enterprise Systems, Systems and Technology Group, IBM India/South Asia, reminds us. “With global temperatures on the rise, many environmentalists are calling for significant reduction in the generation of carbon dioxide from fossil fuels. Commercial electricity consumption is a major factor in rising atmospheric CO2 levels, and data centres are a significant, and growing, part of the problem. Worldwide, data centers are reported to consume 40 tW/hrs of electricity each year, producing an estimated 17.2 bn tonnes of CO2 emissions. This is a concern for all and needs to be addresses by all parties involved,” he says.

Need to Go Virtual
|Once the CIO has analyzed the energy consumption pattern and chalked out a strategy, there are quite a few ways to address the issue. Of the many ways, virtualization is gaining immense ground over the past few years. In a typical scenario, enterprises will have a host of servers, often one for every enterprise-wide application, or racks and racks of storage containing archaic information. Virtualization of software or server can be of immense help as companies can then consolidate their infrastructure.

In fact, a virtualization device or a software application can track the server space and remap applications to different physical locations as necessary. With virtualization, information can be made location-independent and can be redirected across multiple I/O devices and platforms. Little wonder then almost everyone from Cisco, IBM, down to Emerson, HDS, emphazised the need to go virtual.

According to IDC estimates, un-utilized server capacity equates to approximately $140 bn, or more than 20 mn servers. Also, the fact that at 4 tonnes of carbon dioxide emitted annually per server, these un-utilized servers produce a total of more than 80 mn tonner of CO2 per year. This is more than that is emitted from Thailand and more than half of all countries in South America. “Besides the effect on the company's bottom line, virtualization is positively impacting the environment. Gartner estimates that 1.2 mn workloads run in VMware virtual machines, which represents an aggregate power savings of about 8.5 bn kWh-more electricity than is consumed annually in some small countries globally for heating, ventilation and cooling,” says Mahabala.

Nonetheless, Sumit Mukhija, national sales manager, Data Center, Cisco India and Saarc, warns against the virtualization fad and talks of holistic virtualization that encompasses all the different aspects rather than just piece meal. “A key aspect of data center greening is virtualization. Where organizations rolled out server virtualization they became memory bound on their servers, then I/O bound, and then CPU bound. But without virtualising their network and without virtualising their storage, the full benefits of overall efficient resource utilization cannot be realized. And therein lies the key to data center transformation,” he says.

“Data de-duplication technology reduces space, power, and cooling requirements enough to make it practical to use disk as a retention medium for weeks or months without breaking the operational budget” Jim Simon, director, Marketing, Apac, Quantum	“The growth in installation of blade servers and computing requirement is pushing...heat loads to more than 15 kW/hrs, is driving cooling challenges of data centers” Sandeep Nair, MD, Emerson Network Power India	“Worldwide, data centers are reported to consume 40 tW/hrs of electricity each year, producing an estimated 17.2 bn tonnes of CO2 emissions. This is a concern for all and needs to be addressed” Rajesh Saha, country manager, Enterprise Systems, Systems and Technology Group, IBM India/South Asia	“Over the years, storage of data has become highly inefficient, with low utilization, over allocation, stranded storage, too many redundant copies, low access speeds, inefficient search, and disruptive movement and migration” Vivekanand Venugopal, director, Products and Solutions, Apac, Hitachi Data Systems

Storing Better
Another big area that requires CIOs attention is storage. There has been a massive spike over the years in the amount of data that flows through an enterprise these days; with virtually everything going digital, the growth has been phenomenal. Also, due to compliance issues, companies are required to store archaic and old data for longer periods of time. It is a daunting task. Initially, companies went in for either bigger or better storage racks. Result, rooms' choc-o-block with redundant storage. Not only does it consume humongous amount of energy in terms of usage and cooling, but is also a headache in terms of maintenance.

“Over the years, storage of data has become highly inefficient, with low utilization, over allocation, stranded storage, too many redundant copies, low access speeds, inefficient search, and disruptive movement and migration. The actual utilization of storage is less than 30%, and 70% of data over 60-days-old is rarely referenced again. Continuing to buy more of the same old storage architectures will no longer be an option. Buying faster storage processors with larger capacity disks on the same 20-year-old architectures will not solve the problem of inefficient use of storage. New storage architectures will be required to meet this demand for greater efficiency,” states Vivekanand Venugopal, director, Products and Solutions, Apac, Hitachi Data Systems.

And it is not only the storage rack that sucks power but a number of other peripheral devices as well, like Shyam Gopal, regional manager, India and South East Asia, Brocade, points out. “Many devices have a 'fair' level of energy drain in the networked storage space. The SAN Director, which is at the core of the network, is traditionally a significant consumer of power and heat emission. Historically, many organizations have installed Directors in specialized racks that take up more than one floor tile just to allow proper ventilation via the usage of heating ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) systems. Ironically, these HVAC systems at times may consume even more power than the equipment they are trying to cool,” he states.

Analysis of a typical 5,000-sq ft data center shows that demand-side computing equipment account for 52% of energy usage and suppluy-side system account for 48%

Meanwhile, Jim Simon, director, Marketing, Apac, Quantum, talks about the need for something as simple and easy as data de-duplication using efficient storage mediums like tape libraries. “Data de-duplication technology reduces space, power, and cooling requirements enough to make it practical to use disk as a retention medium for weeks or months without breaking the operational budget. However, as data needs to be retained for multiple quarters and years, and the demand for fast recovery diminishes, the most effective retention medium for most users is tape. Tape cartridges in a tape library consume power at lower rates than any disk system, and tape cartridges stored in a vault consume the least of all, as well as provide the lowest aggregated storage cost per GB,” he says.

Gopal, talking about the economics of green storage, says, “Due to tightening purse strings across India, many companies are sensitive toward their IT expenditure. However, many companies do not realize the extent of cost savings that come hand in hand with green storage solution initiatives and how it can create more efficient data storage management. With increased uptake of energy efficient storage products in data centers, many companies can decrease their energy consumption by up to over 20-30% and benefit from cost savings,” he adds.

Green-a Gimmick?
Even though there seems to be a lot of awareness and interest among Indian enterprises in terms of 'greening the data center', there is also a certain amount of distrust and reluctance. Many CIOs claim that vendors are peddling their 'ware' under the green garb. “For most of these companies, from server to storage and others, green is a way to sell more. And right now it seems to be a very fashionable way to do it,” says a senior IT head at one of India's leading banks.

At first look, the claim does not seem to be unjust considering the glut of “green” equipment in the market. Scores of white papers, case studies, facts and figures seem to add to the confusion. Some say that consolidation of hardware is the key, while others state that software-based solution is a key aspect. All this loud green marketing is making the CIO sceptic.

But vendors dispel the charge. “Going green is not at all a gimmick. The growing cost of energy is painfully evident for IT managers, who, in turn, are insisting that vendors put as much emphasis on product design for greenness as more traditional features such as performance and reliability,” says Simon from Quantum.

Whereas Durgadutt Nedungadi, director, Marketing & Alliances, Technology Solutions Group, HP India Sales, talks of how 'operating energy-efficient green data centers has become a priority for Indian CIOs' and the challenges faced by them. “One chief concerns is lack of standards and information-sharing. We believe, industry groups are making progress on establishing best practices, but end-users are struggling with the complexity and scope of the challenges in their facilities. The biggest stumbling block one comes up against in transitioning from the existing data center to green data center is how to do it. There are financial implications also attached to it. Companies with servers or storage virtualization deployments face low data center spending. Other challenges for data center managers are tough internal service-level agreements, continuing data center expansion, and staffing issues,” he states.

Rather than scepticism, the lack of policies to guide the process is the real reason why companies haven't implemented green IT initiatives, states Nedungadi.

In conclusion, it has dawned upon us that the issue of a 'green data center' is too big and too critical so as to be covered in a single story, thus there will be more stories on the same subject in the coming 'green IT' segments of the magazine. So all of those who missed the boat this time, and the ones we could not write about, well, need not worry, there is still a lot more to come. Keep those mails coming. We don't intend to rest till all the data centers are green in some ways or the other.

Shashwat DC
shashwatc@cybermedia.co.in

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