Low Hanging Data Center Savings
by Tim Coote | 30 Aug 2007 | Permalink |
Everything Else, Featured, Go Green, IT Management, Virtualization
I mentioned in my first Tideway blog ( Thoughts on Climate Change) that I’d measured 2.5% of server assets were still running, although as far as IT reporting was concerned, they’d already been decommissioned. At first sight this might not seem significant compared to the cost of finding them. So here’s some numbers:
- the annualised cost of a server in a data center to an enterprise is 15-25,000 USD (yes, even for a 1,000 USD file/print server, or what superficially could be hired as a hosted machine for 1,000 USD pa – I’ll expand on why this is so in a later blog).
- the average CO2 footprint of a DC hosted server is about 7.5 tonnes per annum (about the same as the whole average CO2 footprint of an individual person in Europe).
That gives an annualised value of 375k – 625k USD per 1,000 servers in the estate + a green saving (although it is worth noting that the value of the green saving is very small compared to the operational cash savings: CO2 emission is currently priced at about 30 USD per tonne).
But how do you find these needles in the haystack of the data center, especially if the servers are owned and controlled by different business groups? That was the challenge set to Tideway by one of its customers. Initially, this may sound easy – just count the IP addresses. However, modern estates will have computers with dozens of IP addresses, only a few of which will be recorded in the inventory system.
So we built a solution that can take the complete set of IP addresses in a data center and tell you how active IP addresses are distributed on computers, what the operating systems on the computers are, virtualization relationships, and then reconcile this information with your inventory system. Deployment takes a few days (depending on security assurance tests). Results take a couple of weeks, so it is easy to confirm the benefits and create a bit of new headroom in your data center. And you also get a better picture of the overall quality of your asset/inventory data and how well joined up your IT management processes are.
I really like quick wins like this.
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