Blade Watch

Say I work at a bank, a medium sized investment bank with 1000 servers, comprising DL360/380s and legacy Compaq Proliants like 1600/2500/3000/6500s etc, and I am running a project to virtualize them.  Let’s work on the basis that all servers virtualized will be removed from the datacenter, that if they are to be re-deployed/re-used that they will have to be re-installed in the datacenter. (If this doesn’t happen the energy savings will be marginal, a very large percentage of your kit will be re-designated and redeployed).

Say I choose to virtualize all DL360s, I’m going to go on the basis that they are roughly this specification:
2 processors
1GB RAM
2×18GB disks

A typical early windows 2000 web server.

DL360 energy details:

• Power required (W) 171
• Current required (A) 0.7
• Total BTU per hour 582

Let’s say I buy one DL585G2 for ESX (virtual machine hosting) with the following specification:
4 processors
32GB RAM
2 hard drives
2 fibre cards for SAN
2 network cards

On the basis it’s 86% busy for it’s life:

• Power required (w) 654
• Current required (A) 2.8
• Total BTU per hour 2231

So for me to break even, from a purely energy standpoint, as long as my DL585 can host four DL360s and provide the same performance/benefit then we’re fine.

Let’s push the DL585 a bit, I’m going to load it with 8 servers, with 2GB RAM each, and we’re going to say it works fine, no performance problems, everyone is happy.

Therefore for every DL585 I deploy for vmware, I save one DL585, I save 2231 in BTU, or 654W. A significant saving in my day to day energy costs and for the carbon footprint of my IT, my datacenter.

Taking a look at the earlier Compaq Proliant servers would allow you to virtualize even more systems on the basis of their poor performance per watt ratio. You might find that you can host more servers on your ESX server, saving even more energy costs.

Keep this in mind, when virtualizing your infrastructure do make sure that the old kit is removed, that the energy allocation is reclaimed, otherwise the virtualization project merely becomes a re-allocation project, where I’m migrating servers to re-use hardware.

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