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

Highly virtualized resources are one of the key elements of the energy-
efficient data center model. The next evolutionary step for many data centers
is to understand the utilization of the servers and create projects to address
the utilization of their equipment. Idle servers with no productive work on
them should be turned off, redeployed, or disposed. Low-utilization servers
should have their workload virtualized onto other servers, freeing those low-
utilization servers to be redeployed or disposed. Medium-utilized virtual
servers with high-variance workload should be periodically energy-capped so
that their physical resources can be redeployed for the majority of time the
resources are not needed. High-utilization servers can be created by moving
multiple virtual images to a single physical server. Accounts can then evolve
more toward cloud computing by moving from static virtual images they
have placed on physical servers to dynamic virtual image placement using
policy-based systems management image workload balancing for even higher
levels of utilization.
Governments are increasing their activity in this space. In the United
States, the EPA and DOE are currently working with the IT industry to
develop ENERGY STAR ratings for components such as power supplies, rat-
ptg
ings for equipment such as servers, and ratings for the enterprises such as
data centers. For example, the draft for the ENERGY STAR rating for servers
has been published, and it is anticipated that the final version will be pub-
lished in 2009. Similar work has been done by the European Union, creating
the European Union Code of Conduct for IT.

Lexington Green Data Center Conclusions

The following conclusions can be made from the preceding discussion on
data centers:

■ IT capacity planners are becoming increasing involved in mitigating
facilities capacity planning requirements.
■ Data centers can be monitored to create a baseline to determine their cur-
rent efficiency and affect of future changes to them.
■ Data center upgrades of constrained components such as power can be
used to effectively gain more space in the data center when combined
with installing physically smaller higher-capacity equipment.
■ Virtualization continues to be one of the key technologies for companies
to reduce their power, space, and cooling requirements and significantly
lower their TCO.