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

A month-by-month KWH comparison from 2007 to 2008 indicated that
monthly electric use was reduced for most months despite an increase in the
number of virtual servers. The virtual server growth from 2007 to 2008 is
indicated in Table 9.1.

Table 9.1 Main Data Center Virtual Server and Blade-Server Counts
Virtual Server Dec. 2008 Dec. 2007 Comments
Type count count
VMware 180 140 First VMware server
installed at main data
center in Dec. 2005.
AIX LPAR 195 185 Reduction in AIX
LPARS due to
Oracle/DB2/SQL Server
Farm concept. First
p570 installed at main
data center in Nov.
2005.
Blade Server 060 060 ptg
Total 435 385

Additional Energy Efficiency for the Energy Utility’s
Data Center

There are several projects for the main data center that will continue to
improve energy efficiency, as follows:

■ New UPS: As discussed under the “Build” step, the facility manager for
the main data center drove the process to replace the 20-year-old UPS.
This was completed at the end of 2008. Because power for almost all IT
devices flows through the UPS, the efficiency improvement of the UPS
(up to 15 percent) will significantly help reduce electrical use at the data
center during 2009 and beyond.
■ Continued IT virtualization: There are still several hundred legacy
stand-alone servers at the main data center. The plan is to continue to
consolidate and virtualize these servers based on the ongoing server
refresh and server consolidation programs.