8th
Taming the data monster
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20080206.wgtdatacentre07/BNStory/GlobeTQ
Ian Harvey
February 6, 2008 at 10:00 PM EST
Georgian College’s technology had hit the wall – literally.
The community college in Barrie, Ont., had no room to add more servers to meet the growing demand. IT staff at the college faced a familiar challenge: In the past few years, the cost of storage has dropped dramatically, and businesses have filled basements and warehouses with cheap servers to satisfy the ever-increasing glut of data.
However, the cost of real estate to house the machines – not to mention the electricity to power them – has not declined. In fact, it’s ballooned.
Data centres are power pigs and they’re found in nearly every sector of the economy: everything from business to academia to every level of government. They gobble electricity in an effort to keep hard drives spinning and to feed the insatiable demands of cooling systems that keep processors from overheating. Research by technology analysts IDC suggests for each dollar spent on hardware, another 50 cents is spent on energy costs. By 2001, that ratio will rise to 71 cents per dollar, IDC says in a 2006 study on data centre power consumption.
Georgian College network technologist Shamus Berube replaced 25 servers with 12 power-efficient models. (BILL SANDFORD for the Globe and Mail)
The cost in dollars is compounded by another cost: Studies show that between 2002 and 2006, carbon emissions from data farms doubled.
As a result, businesses have sought ways recently to pare down their racks of servers, trim power consumption and reduce carbon footprints – and at the same time increase the efficiency of their servers so they can accommodate the never-ending stream of data.
Faced with that challenge, Shamus Berube, Georgian College’s network technologist, figured the best plan was to redesign the data farm from the ground up. Mr. Berube replaced the college’s 25 servers with 12 new power-efficient servers made by Dell Inc.
But, for many businesses, new equipment is not enough. While the Dell machines emitted less heat and required less power to run, Georgian College also installed virtualization software from VMware Inc., which is used to create virtual storage partitions on a single machine. Users can install programs on each partition, including operating systems, and run several different processes concurrently. So instead of using four different machines to perform four different tasks (and running at barely 15 or 20 per cent efficiency), the college can run all four tasks on a single machine.
Now, each of Georgian College’s systems runs more efficiently, consumes less power and the IT department can set up isolated areas on the network for students in the college’s extensive technology program who can test theories or run programs without spilling into the main system.
“What we’ve done with the VMware we couldn’t have done otherwise,” Mr. Berube says. “We’ve split the academic side from the faculty side, though they run on the same physical machines, and we can save power there.”
Virtualization software has another purpose as well, one that has more of an impact than simply dividing a physical machine into many virtual drives. Because storage is so inexpensive, businesses have become accustomed to keeping every little shred of data that’s created or passes through their servers. Some businesses, adhering to rules of corporate governance, are obligated to. Nothing gets deleted any more.
Case in point: Dan Trim is director of IT infrastructure at the Health Alliance Plan of Michigan, a health insurance company that services 570,000 clients. Less than a decade ago, the health network had about 80 gigabytes of storage on their mainframe, which today is an average-sized laptop hard drive. “Today, we have about 90 terabytes of storage [90,000 gigabytes] on the storage area network with about 120 terabytes across the company.”
To avoid mountains of data piled up in no particular order, virtualization software from vendors such as VMware and Symantec Corp. acts like a traffic cop, managing data in an orderly fashion and determining where programs or information are best stored.
Sean Derrington, Symantec’s director of storage management, points out an obvious benefit. Businesses will often have multiple copies of the same file on their servers. Maybe it’s a large PowerPoint presentation or a Word document that’s been e-mailed to 2,000 different employees who have all dragged it to their desktop or made a backup copy. Regardless, Mr. Derrington says, “you don’t need 10 copies of the same file.” Software such as Symantec’s Veritas Data Center can identify duplicates and zap them.
But while efficiency and cost savings may be driving businesses’ decisions to upgrade their server farms, there’s a tangential aspect of the new hardware and software that’s decidedly green.
In a 2007 report, the Washington-based Environmental Protection Agency found that the 2006 electricity bill for the servers and data centres in the United States was calculated at approximately $4.5-billion (U.S.). The study goes on to estimate that by implementing efficient technologies and practices, business, academia and government can reduce electrical use by between 20 and 55 per cent by 2011.
And naturally the green benefits are part of the pitch from vendors such as Sun Microsystems, Dell, Intel, IBM and Hewlett-Packard, who all now sell energy-efficient hardware and management software. Some vendors walk the walk, too. HP and IBM have spent more than $1-billion each to consolidate their data centres – in HP’s case to six centres from 85 around the globe, while IBM trimmed more than 150 centres down to a dozen.
Bill Dupley, HP Canada’s IT strategist, says based on HP’s own experience in consolidation, reorganizing a database should be recognized as smart business, not as an IT project.
“We promised a 43-per-cent annual return on an investment of $1-billion,” he says, adding that it was those upfront numbers that got the project fast-tracked. “We delivered $300-million right off the top in lower network costs. The rest will come over three years in terms of needing 50 per cent fewer staff and savings in power consumption and cooling costs.”
Special to The Globe and Mail
BY THE NUMBERS
$1.4-Million — Average annual electrical expense that data centres cost large corporations
20 — Percentage savings potential of green data centres
46 — Percentage of data centre managers talking about or testing green concept
29 — Percentage of managers not considering going green
Source: Symantec green data centre report, published November, 2007
