Data Centers Go Green

DATA CENTERS GO GREEN



Intelligence, defense and other federal agencies are embracing energy-
efficient technology by virtualizing their computer servers and storage, thus
managing their data more effectively and reducing management costs.

by Erin Flynn Jay, MGT Correspondent

Intelligence, defense and other federal agencies are embracing energy-efficient technology by virtualizing their computer servers and storage, thus managing their data more effectively and reducing management costs.

The emphasis on “green” information technology comes amid a growing realization that saving energy involves not only by using efficient light bulbs and increasing the fleet miles-per-gallon average, but also by curbing the intensive use of electricity by computer, communications and supporting equipment. A recent study found that while most businesses and government organizations care about reducing energy consumption in IT, the substantial potential savings are achievable only by a comprehensive effort.

The issue of energy consumption is especially significant in the field of geospatial intelligence, due to the massive storage needs created by modern satellite, video and other imagery.

A number of companies are stepping up their efforts to provide energy-efficient hardware and software to federal agencies. They include NetApp, which creates storage and data management solutions, and VMware, a software provider for industry-standard virtualized desktops and servers that has been working on a project for the National Security Agency.

NetApp’s approach to fighting growing power consumption is to subtract machines and disks from the power equation by using storage more efficiently. This strategy has many corollary benefits, in lowering complexity and people, support and service costs while improving network efficiency and performance.

Consolidation is the number-one issue for the government and other organizations, according to Mark Weber, president and general manager of NetApp’s U.S. public sector. “People are virtualizing their storage and servers, consolidating boxes out there. Fewer boxes means less juice. We have been the major beneficiary of that virtualization/consolidation effort throughout the government. I’ve got a huge intelligence team and Department of Defense team, and we are focused on every [government] account.”

Upgrading drives to higher capacity yields fewer drives and less need for power. “Typically in the industry, storage on average is utilized 25 percent to 40 percent of the time. So if you have a terabyte, 25 percent to 40 percent of that terabyte has data on it; the rest is white space,” said Weber.

The goal is to increase utilization. “At NetApp, our utilization is more like 60 percent to 70 percent. What does that mean?” said Weber. “You need less storage to manage your environment, less power. There is a lot of interesting software we have that drives your utilization rates up.”

Another specific impact on the government going green is that when users virtualize and consolidate, they get more efficient in how they manage their data. “Anytime you have to move data and reconstruct it or get it consolidated, you know what you have and can manage it better. If you are more efficient about how you organize your data on your storage, then you’ve driven down your management costs,” Weber said. “The simplicity of our system allows them to manage more data.”

Storage is a piece of the IT solution. “The most important thing I want to say about going green is it’s not just about reducing your footprint—having fewer things to power up. It’s really about the software technology you employ to get the maximum usage out of what you own,” Weber concluded. “We spend a huge portion of our R&D on software technology to have you use less storage. If you go back to our R&D, that’s why we’re doing so well with the government and green technology.”

HIGH-ASSURANCE PLATFORM

VMware in August announced an agreement with General Dynamics C4 Systems to develop a turn-key High-Assurance Platform (HAP) workstation using VMware software for a contract with NSA. VMware emphasizes that its virtualization solutions are saving customers in costs and carbon emissions. Using VMware virtualization, customers can consolidate 10 or more physical machines onto a single server and reduce power consumption and cost by 80 percent to 90 percent. VMware customers that have moved from a one-toone application-to-server ratio to 60 to one or higher have achieved millions of dollars in capital and operational savings.

For every server virtualized, customers can save about 7,000 kilowatt hours, or four tons of CO2 emissions, every year. VMware has virtualized more than six million server workloads since 1998, resulting in an estimated energy savings of nearly 39 billion kWh, or a value of roughly $4.4 billion. This is roughly equivalent to the total energy consumption of Denmark for one year.

PCs virtualized and hosted on servers in the datacenter can also reduce power consumption and cost by 35 percent. Hosting desktops in the datacenter also doubles the replacement cycle of PCs or thin clients, reducing the environmental impact associated with manufacturing new equipment. “Most servers and desktops today are still consuming 70 percent to 80 percent of their rated power even when idle,” said Stephen Herrod, chief technology officer, VMware.

“VMware is able to deliver substantial power and cost savings through innovative power management capabilities in our virtualization solutions that safely power down or throttle servers when not in use,” Herrod continued. “By powering down servers and desktops during inactive periods such as evenings or weekends, we can help customers save another 25 percent or more on power consumption without affecting applications or users.”

NSA contracted with General Dynamics C4 Systems to design a secure workstation, and General Dynamics chose VMware’s virtualization software so that HAP-mandated users employed by the Department of Defense, intelligence community and other government agencies can access information requiring different security clearance levels from a single physical machine.

VMware software allows users to run the equivalent of physically isolated machines with separate levels of security clearance on the same workstation. Through the joint HAP project, government agencies would be able to purchase an end-to-end secure workstation solution developed by General Dynamics that preintegrates VMware software and provides secure access to multiple clearance levels in accordance with government regulations. Agencies purchasing the HAP workstations stand to realize other benefits in addition to enabling secure access to multiple clearance levels. The HAP workstations are designed to provide tactical units a reduction in size, weight and power requirements for their mobile field environments while being able to share assured information across communities of interest, ensuring that troops in the field receive the information they need when they need it.

The HAP workstations also are designed to provide the government a significant reduction in user workstation footprints and associated lifecycle costs, providing an immediate decrease in network administration and hardware infrastructure costs while ensuring that information sharing is effective, safe and secure.

“VMware virtualization software provides security and isolation to simplify IT operations in areas as wide-ranging as enterprise desktop management, application lifecycle management and system infrastructure management,” said Aileen Black, vice president of federal sales at VMware. “Our efforts with General Dynamics and the NSA will allow government agencies with the most stringent security requirements to benefit from the broad efficiencies and flexibility afforded through virtualization.”

“The NSA HAP program is interested in developing the next generation of standards and technologies that will be the foundation of secure platforms that allow access to different classified domains and the ability to securely share data between different classified enclaves,” said Prescott B. Winter, former director of the NSA/Central Security Service Commercial Solutions Center and now the chief technology officer at NSA.

STORAGE EFFICIENCY

NetApp was received industry attention for its storage efficiency, data center design and techniques to reduce power consumption in its data center.

NetApp formed a cross-organizational, multifunction team to approach the task of reducing power consumption and increasing energy efficiency in its data center. This team deployed efficient storage and innovative design techniques to optimize overall power efficiency through the modification of NetApp’s data center power delivery and cooling systems. The data center now meets or exceeds the Environmental Protection Agency’s 2011 energy usage stateof- the-art data center maximum achievable scenario.

NetApp dramatically increased storage utilization and reduced power consumption through innovative data management and design. NetApp consolidated its storage systems and replaced 50 systems with 10 storage systems, increasing capacity utilization to more than 60 percent. NetApp reduced its data center footprint from 24.83 to 5.28 racks and decreased chilled water demand by 94 tons, which helped reduce electricity by nearly half a million kWh and led to an annual savings of more than $59,000.

The company this summer unveiled the ability to deduplicate primary storage from other vendors with its V-Series family of storage virtualization solutions. The V-Series product line enables customers with storage systems not from NetApp to leverage NetApp’s Data ONTAP 7G operating system for improved business efficiency and reduced data management complexity. NetApp V-Series allows customers who have EMC, Hitachi Data Systems, HP or other storage systems to deploy NetApp deduplication technology to reduce redundant copies of data on these systems.

By reducing redundant data, deduplication on NetApp V-Series will also help customers gain maximum value from their current storage investments by better utilizing existing storage capacity.

NetApp deduplication has become one of the fastest growing technologies in the company’s history. The adoption rate among customers has surpassed the 10,000-system level, with more than 2,500 customers deploying NetApp deduplication. NetApp executives argue that they have delivered end-to-end deduplication technology that serves primary storage and is fully integrated into its mainline storage operating system. As a result, customers are realizing the full benefit of deduplication across all tiers of data, including primary, backup and archival.

“By providing our V-Series customers with deduplication technology that spans from primary to archival data, they are able to better control their heterogeneous data growth while reducing costs and simplifying data management,” said Brendon Howe, vice president and general manager, NAS and V-Series Business Units for NetApp. “It is apparent that our customers are rethinking their traditional approaches to data storage.”

“Surpassing the 10,000-system milestone is a testament to the value that our customers place on deduplication in all storage environments,” said Patrick Rogers, senior vice president of solutions marketing. “NetApp strongly believes that deduplication is an integral feature of any storage system, which is why all of our current FAS systems are available with deduplication technology that serves primary and secondary workloads.”

Deduplication technology, which plays an important role in storage efficiency, continues to gain traction with customers who struggle with data growth and the issues that are associated with it. Deduplication enables customers to eliminate redundant data quickly and easily, improving space and power efficiencies and reducing the amount of raw storage required.

NetApp deduplication strengthens the company’s portfolio of space-saving technologies, which includes thin provisioning, Snapshot copies and flexible clones. Like most of these space-saving technologies, deduplication is a feature of the Data ONTAP operating system that comes at no extra cost. NetApp is the only major storage and data management vendor to embed deduplication technology in all of its unified storage systems, according to the company, which plans by the end of the year to have all if its storage systems with deduplication technology.

DATA CENTER ARCHITECTURES

Another key capability involves enabling customers to transform their data center architectures. Enterprise customers are undergoing significant data center transformations to enhance IT flexibility and efficiency as server virtualization moves into broader deployment. To enable this transformation, NetApp is providing customers a proven storage platform for virtualized environments to achieve increased service levels, higher asset utilization, and greater data center power, space and cooling efficiencies.

“Combining VMware’s full data center virtualization solutions with NetApp’s networked storage solutions is dramatically improving data management and providing customers a path to creating a transparent infrastructure,” said Jay Kidd, chief marketing officer at NetApp.

“Our research indicates that IT departments are continually challenged to do more with less, making it increasingly difficult to manage infrastructure complexity while at the same time meet service level agreements and increase staff productivity,” said Roger Cox, research vice president for the Gartner research firm. “Customers are looking for an architectural approach that will deliver near instant response to business unit requests, automate the most labor intensive tasks, and scale infrastructure transparently over time.”

NetApp’s high-performance storage solutions were specifically developed to transform data center technology into a competitive business advantage. As a result, many NetApp customers are realizing significant storage efficiency savings as part of their data center transformation. A recent study by Oliver Wyman concluded that NetApp technologies such as deduplication and thin provisioning dramatically reduced the amount of power, cooling and space needed in data centers. Customers found that NetApp requires 50 percent less raw storage and rack space and uses 51 percent less power and heat load per usable terabyte. ♦