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The Greening of IT
152 How Companies Can Make a Difference for the Environment

This was done to ensure availability of the data center; however, an added
benefit is a high-efficiency UPS that should boost efficiency to 95 percent
from the 80 percent efficiency that is typical of 20-year-old UPS systems.
This should result in a significant gain in energy efficiency because power for
almost all IT devices flows through the UPS. For additional information on
the impact of the UPS on data center energy utilization, see the upcoming
section “The Energy Impact of the UPS.”
Another energy-saving project was to place all data center lights on
motion detectors. This was a simple low-cost project with a significant
return on investment because previously the data center lights were
always on.

Step 3. Virtualize
As discussed in Step 1 (and extensively in Chapter 6, “A Most-Significant
Step—‘Virtualizing’ Your IT Systems”), server and storage virtualization is
the strategy for all new servers and new storage. The virtualize step is recog-
nized as the most significant way to improve the efficiency of the IT portion
of the data center. Server virtualization provides the flexibility to allocate
ptg
only the server resource required for an application. The data center virtual
servers are based on LPARS on the pSeries boxes and VMware for the xSeries
®
servers. AIX 5.3 and Micro-Partitioning™ allow re-allocation that can be
dynamic and can be in fractions of a CPU.
The typical virtual server configurations at the main data center are as
follows:

■ VMWARE or Windows virtual servers (typical configuration):
♦ Four-way dual core xSeries (IBM 3850) (newer boxes are eight-way).
♦ 16GB memory (newer boxes have 32GB).
♦ Four to 10 virtual servers.
♦ Energy savings: The VMware Web site gives case studies of 25
percent to 75 percent energy-savings consolidating stand-alone
Intel servers onto VMware virtual servers. Case studies also indicate
significant increase in CPU utilization (at least double).
■ P570 pSeries for AIX virtual servers:
♦ Eight-way dual core p570.
♦ 64GB memory.
♦ Micro-partitioning.