Post By Martin 0 Comments
February 2007 01

What’s my server carbon footprint

Reducing the amount of energy your servers use can help reduce your carbon footprint and significantly reduce your energy bill, it’s not only good business, it’s good for the environment, so what steps would I take?

1. Make my datacenter lights out -they only need to be on when I’m walking around it, and certainly not at 3am – when there’s no one there
2. Start looking at low power servers going forward – the new Intel Xeon processors are meant to have a high performance/watt rating
3. Consolidate your applications
4. Consolidate the physical servers – choose some target servers
5. Look at removing internal storage – put all data (possibly excluding windows) on to SAN – reduce number of spinning disks
6. Virtualize

The first two are relatively straight forward, ask the datacenter and facilities teams to look at your datacenter configuration see if there are any quick wins, you never know there may be some really easy steps that could be taken to reduce your datacenter power requirements (any high energy old 14″ crt monitors that could be replaced with a low power TFT?

Consolidating the applications means looking at the server estate, the big picture, on a business line/application level, so you may have three main business lines with four applications in each, say each application needs a database server, could we reduce that to two?

Buy a slightly bigger server, say a 4 or 8 way box with a bit more memory and use that instead of two or three dl380′s?

Consolidating the physical servers can cost very little, and be quite straight forward. Choose a platform, I’m a Compaq boy, so lets go with Proliants, identify all the servers you have and identify by model. Say you’ve got 1000 servers, how many non DL’s have you got? Any 8500s/6500s/6400s/5000s/2500s/1600s? These could all be either virtualized or quite easily replaced with something newer going out the door.

For example, got several 1600s, 2500s that aren’t going anywhere for the time being? Swap them with a DL360, it will take up less space, and be significantly faster, and you’d save a significant amount of space. Check with datacenter planning/server team, they’ll know the best models for low power.

Get rid of those external arrays, walking around any big datacenter, you’d be amazed how many systems are still using them, and how inefficient they are from a space and a power perspective. Ideally everything should go on the SAN, it’s more secure, the power/heat is already accounted for and it will be more reliable, as the SAN will have built in redundancy.

Not everything need go on the SAN though. Say I’ve got a Compaq 1600 with 5x9gb drives, and an array of 10x4GB drives that’s a total of about 72gb of space that you can use (raid5 setup), a DL360 or 380 could replace both the disk array and the server, giving you similar if not better performance and could provide this space and more.

Virtualization is by far the best way for the long term, consolidating your servers into virtual sessions, reducing the number of servers you have in the datacenter has got to be a good thing. Even if you only achieve 4 or 8 virtual servers to one physical box, you’re still going to make a significant saving in energy and reduction in your servers’ carbon footprint.




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