Three tips to help you effectively reduce data center energy consumption

With the gradual recovery of the global economy, the stagnation of new application software and market potential are pushing the server to rise. According to Forrester Consulting's research, 25% of enterprise users predict that server spending will increase by 5% to 10%, and 6% of users predict that server spending will increase by more than 10%. In order to reduce operational and capital expenditures, in order to improve disaster recovery capabilities and speed up the launch of new applications, enterprise users have turned their attention to server virtualization.

But the latest source of power to expand and enhance server virtualization applications comes primarily from users' need to reduce energy consumption. What is the reason? You can refer to the following three sources:

- Economic factors: The energy consumption and cooling costs generated during the server life cycle actually exceed the purchase price of the server itself. Virtualization technology reduces the overall energy consumption of the server's carbon footprint, so it can run the same workload on a smaller number of physical servers.

- Flexibility: To ensure system uptime and service level agreements, virtualization technology can alleviate space underutilization, energy and cooling constraints.

- Environmental Needs: In the future, virtualization technology can reduce the overall carbon footprint of servers and reduce energy-related CO2 emissions and power consumption by purchasing and processing server equipment.

In order to achieve the goal of reducing server energy consumption by up to 65% and tapping energy savings potential through virtualization, Forrester Consulting has recommended three solutions for improving processes:

1. Increase Number of Physical Servers Migrating to Virtual Servers

Business users have a huge opportunity to increase the overall number of servers in all server and platform environments. We found that although nearly 90% of enterprise users are deploying virtualization or planning to deploy virtualization on their servers, only 37% of their X86 operating systems are virtual servers. In the next two years, this proportion is expected to grow to 65%.

In addition, the breadth of virtualization varies according to the server environment and platform type. The first thing to do to reduce energy consumption is to increase the overall proportion of virtualization in all environments and platforms. To ensure that you are indeed saving energy, shut down or eliminate servers that are no longer running any workloads. Forrester Consulting's Green IT Mature Evaluation Methodology will achieve a green IT maturity virtualization goal divided into four phases, namely 1) increase the demand phase (increasing the virtualization utilization rate from 1% to 25%); 2) improve again Phase (increasing virtualization utilization from 26% to 50%); 3) booming phase (virtualization utilization increased from 51% to 75%); 4) optimal phase (virtualization utilization increased from 76% to 100%).

2. Maximize the integration and utilization of virtual machines and physical hosts

Virtualization is not enough. In addition to improving the overall utilization of server virtualization, more efficient virtualization goals are achieved through more efficient virtualization. Server virtualization ratios are not synchronized with current server hardware and virtualization platform capacity. It is common to purchase a new server in a 4:1 ratio of virtual machines to physical hosts, but most servers can hold 15 virtual machines. More efficient virtualization can help enterprise users buy fewer than three servers, not to mention the added energy, cooling and floor space costs of new equipment.

The key metric for the administrator to determine the number of virtual machines that each physical host can host is the utilization of the server's central processor. There is a direct correlation between central processor utilization, virtual machines hosted by each physical host, and power savings. The average utilization rate of underutilized servers may be only 10% to 15%, although the utilization of virtual servers can theoretically approach 100%. However, Forrester found that most administrators are slower in moving their physical server host utilization from 25% to 50% -- the number of virtual machines hosted on each physical server and the potential for energy savings. Both have caused restrictions. Underutilized servers still consume a lot of energy.

If you increase the number of virtual machines hosted on each physical server host, you can reduce the number of physical servers and power consumption. As server teams become more accustomed to higher server virtualization utilization, they can be more secure and host more virtual machines on each physical server without sacrificing service levels.

3. Purchasing more energy-efficient servers and architectures

If you increase server utilization or realize that you need a higher-end server infrastructure, purchase more efficient servers and systems. Architecture may be the only option to reduce energy consumption. Energy consumption will be higher on a per-server basis, but the overall energy consumption of the server will benefit from a reduction in the overall number of servers. If your risk tolerance does not allow you to increase the limits of virtual provisioning rates, then these more efficient server environments may be your only viable option.

Forrester recommends that users choose the latest model of the same type of server that has been purchased in your business. Server updates will reduce the power consumption of the server. Newer server architectures, such as blade server systems and converged infrastructure, are not only more efficient in their own nature, but they also drive the overall virtualization provisioning rate.

Energy efficiency is very encouraging, as one of the vice presidents of Network Services said to the converged architecture: "We have reduced 70% of our space, saved 25% in operating costs, and improved 30% to 40% heat loss and 40% energy saving."