It was not so long ago that we spared little thought to how much electricity a device consumed or where that energy came from. To an extent, this is how many data centres have been implemented and even managed, with little to no consideration for what it takes to keep the lights on. But, given the current energy crisis, power and powerlessness are currently front of mind for many consumers and businesses.
According to Ian Jansen Van Rensburg, senior systems engineering manager, sub-Saharan Africa at VMware, talking about green data centres has long been a necessity, but it's only once these challenges become a reality and affect the company's bottom line that they start moving up the business agenda.
"Data centres are hungry beasts that demand energy and consume it at a rapid rate," notes Paul Ruinaard, regional sales manager at Nutanix sub-Saharan Africa. The problem with the local situation is that many companies have responded to load shedding by putting large generators in place to keep things running when the power goes out, but these are just consuming a different type of fuel. "So it's a catch-22 because while the data may be protected and always on - they aren't really much greener than they were in the first place," says Ruinaard.
"Organisations looking to reduce their contribution to global warming and climate change would do well to start by focusing on their data centres," says Stephen Green, Dimension Data's executive for Next Generation Data Centres. From an energy consumption perspective, the total data centre footprint globally equates to the same amount of power used by the sixth most power-hungry country in the world, he notes.
The legacy systems of the past are terribly inefficient, which is why data centres generally consume such a sizable amount of electricity. "This inefficiency starts at the ageing of servers, which haven't been optimised with lower energy footprints and intelligent platforms that can switch off components in the server when they are not being used, thereby reducing the overall power consumption of the server." He also notes that many data centres are built with a 'data vault' approach, featuring a single room with full-capacity air-conditioning running constantly to cool the servers. Simply rethinking the design of the datacentre can drastically reduce this energy burden because it means the organisation is better able to control things like hot and cold air, for example.
But Ruinaard adds that effectively managing energy use is only one piece of a very elaborate green data centre puzzle. Businesses need to look under the hood of what they have and then make a calculated decision about what they must replace to become more efficient. And this is where resistance commonly comes in because it means the business needs to spend money in order to save money, he goes on to say. This is where virtualised and cloud-based strategies come in.
Virtual reality
Think of 40 people driving individual cars to work. Now put all of these 40 people on a bus instead. The overall efficiency of the latter scenario is obvious. If you take this analogy a step further and imagine the same 40 people arriving home and leaving their cars idling throughout the night, it's even more evident that taking those 40 cars out of the equation would be a smart move. This is how businesses should be thinking about virtualisation, says Janse Van Rensburg. A server that is idle consumes almost the same volume of power as a server would consume running at roughly 80% of its utilisation, which amounts to wasteful business. "Virtualisation, through its ability to consolidate many on one, or many to few, ensures you use less space, less power, fewer devices and even fewer people," he adds.
Virtualisation, through its ability to consolidate many on one, or many to few, ensures you use less space, less power, less devices and even less people.
Ian Jansen Van Rensburg, senior systems engineering manager, VMware
In this case, says AJ Hartenberg, portfolio manager for Data Centre Services at T-Systems in South Africa, less really is more. The smaller your physical infrastructure, the greener your data centre. But having less doesn't mean you have to do less; it's about outsourcing, partnering with the right network providers and boosting overall data centre efficiency to get the most out of the resources you have at your disposal. This requires a mindset change, notes Hartenberg, pointing out that some customers still want to own the infrastructure because they believe this gives them greater control over what is happening in their business. But what they really should be thinking about is whether or not they have the necessary expertise and capabilities to maintain the level of service required by the business and whether doing things on their own is less or more cost-effective and efficient than partnering with an experienced service provider.
(A)head in the clouds
Cloud computing will transform IT, asserts Brett Dunn, systems engineer at EMC, and will also change how data centres are being managed and run. "Cloud reduces costs, improves IT efficiency and business agility and contributes to a more environmentally friendly way of delivering IT services." And agility is key here, he notes, because modern businesses need to be able to change things up if and when the situation dictates. For example, adopting cloud strategies means the organisation requires fewer servers, which reduces the infrastructure investment and space required to get the job done. One of the main benefits of adopting cloud to reduce the footprint of a data centre, says Dunn, is being able to dynamically allocate resources so there's enough capacity to handle peak data loads, and businesses can reduce the amount of time machines sit idle.
According to Jonathan Kropf, CEO at Tarsus Cloud On Demand, cloud offers a unique way to consolidate data centres; it puts data centre consolidation on steroids. Service providers that were 'born in the cloud' use the latest technologies, software solutions and hardware, which means they don't have the same inefficiencies and restraints as legacy systems.
For Milind Halapeth, GM and global head for Datacentre Practice at Wipro, the right cloud strategy can help businesses make their data centres a little greener. Digitisation and digitising assets, he says, are an essential step in any journey to become greener. While things like app and infrastructure monitoring may not be front of mind for many organisations, as the amount of data that IT departments have to deal with continues to explode, these will become more and more important for organisations looking to plan ahead.
A green how-to
Consider for a moment how much space and capacity tech giants like Google and Facebook require to keep their services running at all times. Now consider how troublesome it would be for either company to not manage their data centres effectively. Faced with this conundrum, both Google and Facebook realised they needed the reliability of traditional data centres, but with cloud-centric economics and scale, coupled with the performance traditionally provided by legacy infrastructure.
Acknowledging that existing legacy data centre infrastructure simply did not meet their demands, the pair opted for a hyperconverged solution.
"To them, it was a simple factor of economics, coupled with a need to scale at an alarming rate," says Paul Ruinaard, regional sales manager at Nutanix sub-Saharan Africa. This was a good option for organisations of this magnitude because hyperconvergence is characterised by automation and simplicity. "With a hyperconverged device, you can automate and rationalise infrastructure so that you can feed bigger data centres and, in turn, house more data. This is really what Web-scale companies need to do."
Data centres are hungry beasts that demand energy and consume it at a rapid rate.
Paul Ruinaard, regional sales manager, Nutanix Sub-Saharan Africa
The duo essentially redesigned virtualisation, notes Ruinaard, making it smarter, more efficient and more 'elastic', which meant they could do the same thing, but with a substantially smaller footprint. But it isn't only large-scale organisations that are realising the importance of running data centres in a more efficient fashion, governments are increasingly starting to see the value of making changes to long-standing business processes, he continues.
Identifying that the number of federal data centres had nearly tripled in 10 years, the US government launched the Federal Data Centre Consolidation Initiative, which sought to make computing more efficient and less expensive by reducing the size of its datacentre portfolio. The initiative promotes the use of green IT by reducing the overall energy and real estate footprint of government data centres, while also reducing the cost of data centre hardware, software and operations and, importantly, shifting existing IT infrastructure to more efficient computing platforms and technologies.
While these may be international examples, Ruinaard is adamant the same thing can be done locally; it simply requires that government agencies leverage similar advanced software technologies and strategies to really shake the dust off legacy systems and basically reinvent themselves.
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