Chief Info Officers Guide to Green IT

8/12/2019 Chief Info Officers Guide to Green IT

1/23

The CIOs Guide toVirtualization and

Green ITIn 2008, improving data center efficiency is a major initiative for IT. Lack of

physical space, the increasing cost of energy, and the need to protect the

environment are all key drivers in the efforts to upgrade the data center.

Fortunately, there are many options available. Blade servers, virtualization

software, and new data center management and cooling techniques are among

the tools that can be used to achieve greater efficiency.

Read this SearchCIO.com E-guide to learn how CIOs are using virtualization to

save power, money and space, become more environmentally friendly, and to

set up a more effective disaster recovery plan.

Sponsored By:

E-Guide


2/23

The CIOs Guide to Virtualization and Green IT

Table of Contents

Sponsored by: Page 2 of 23

Table of Contents:

Blade servers cut costs, aid DR planning

Managing the Energy Crisis: A Special Report for CIOs

Ten strategic technologies to watch in 2008

Virtualization increasingly used to abet disaster recovery

Resources from HP

The CIOs Guide toVirtualization andGreen IT

E-Guide


3/23


By Herman Mehling, Contributor

Blade servers are very alluring to CIOstheyre space-saving, fully functional units that deploy easily, reduce power

usage and work smoothly with leading virtualization software from companies like VMware Inc. All of which makes

blades perfect for server consolidation and for saving power and money.

Ed Sherman, network services manager for Kitsap County, Wash., said he expects to save taxpayers about

$300,000 by using blade servers instead of rebuilding his server room to house regular servers. Sherman and his

staff are consolidating 60 standard servers (half the rooms total number of servers) into five Hewlett-Packard Co.

blades running VMwares virtualization software. The county plans to buy four more HP blades for failover and dis-

aster recovery purposes.

We have zero floor space left for expanding the server room, and we cant get any more electrical power in here,

Sherman said. Blades are the perfect solution for us. They give us room to grow, without requiring more power.

The blades and software will cost about $100,000.

Virtualized blades also give us a fantastic platform for our disaster recovery plan, he said. They will give us the

ability to be up and running within minutes of any disaster.

Benefits of blades

Reducing server sprawl is the main reason behind users adoption of blades, according to TheInfoPro Inc.s Wave 4

Server Study. Sixty-six percent of enterprise respondents to the study believe that by 2009, blades will make up

more than 50% of all new server units acquired.

Blades are smaller than standard rack-mounted servers, which are stacked horizontally, much like a pile of pizza

boxes. Blades also fit into racks, but theyre packed vertically, similar to books on a shelf, and make better use of

space.

A big benefit of blade servers is they plug into a backplane that enables them to share vital resourcespower, cool-

ing and networking connectionsthat rack-mounted servers dont share.

Downside to blade servers

Blades are not without their downsides, of course.

The biggest downside is the per-unit cost of a bladeprices start near $2,000 and rise precipitously. Of course, if

you can virtualize 10 or more standard servers into one blade unit, the unit cost is put into context.





4/23

Another downside can be less-than-perfect cooling of the blade enclosure. This was more of an issue when blades

first appeared, but its less so nowadays with the prevalence of well-engineered units from Dell Inc., HP, IBM and

Sun, some of the most prominent players in the market.

Still, many of todays data centers arent designed to hold numerous servers packed tightly together. Adding dozens

or hundreds of blades will require IT people to ensure they have sufficient air conditioning power and that their

data center floors can handle the weight of numerous racks crammed with dozens of blades from top to bottom.

Another downside to blades is the proprietary nature of the hardware, said Steve Kaplan, president of Access Flow

Inc., a Sacramento, Calif.-based solution provider that specializes in VMware virtualization.

I never recommend blades to any of my clients, Kaplan said. I think the proprietary nature of blade technology is

too limiting. It ties customers to one vendors boxes, interfaces and firmware upgrades. If space is not an issue, I

see no reason why a company would want to choose a blade server.

The proprietary nature of HPs blades does not bother Sherman. The solution works extremely well, he said. It

will allow us to scale up for a long time to come.





5/23

Technology for better business outcomes

4AA13013ENW

24x7 lights-out computing environment, based

on standard building blocks, automated using modularsoftware and delivered through comprehensive services:

Lowering the cost of IT operations

Delivering higher quality of service with less risk

Accelerating the speed of IT change forgreater flexibility

HP Adaptive InfrastructureDelivering the next-generation data center

www.hp.com/go/ai


6/23


By Tom Kaneshige

Rows of flashing slot machines buzz throughout Viejas Enterprises tribal casino. An outdoor arena erupts with light

and sound as entertainers such as country singer Randy Travis and comedian Bill Cosby take the stage. Energy

emanates freely from the epicenter of this Indian reservation 30 miles east of San Diegothat is, except inside its

data center.

Two years ago CIO Moti Vyas IT staff was plugging new servers into the nearest outlet inside a cramped server

room, only to receive calls from the facilities department. Youre drawing too much power from the circuit, they said.

More power would also be needed to cool the new servers, yet the server room was nearing its power threshold. All

this because Viejas Enterprises was trying to keep up with Californians growing appetite for gambling and entertain-

ment.

So Vyas added another server room to gain a little more power and spacea temporary fix as he planned a grander

solution. Viejas Enterprises eventually made a multimillion-dollar investment to build an energy-efficient data cen-

ter. There were business drivers and technology drivers, Vyas says. Business drivers were to support todays

business and plan for tomorrows needs. The technology drivers were power, cooling due to blade servers and virtu-

alization, security and future-proofing.

Like many CIOs, Vyas had hit a wall when faced with the need to scale up his server room, largely because of ener-

gy concerns. Last year U.S. data centers consumed more than 60 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity at a cost of

about $4.5 billion, according to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). A good chunk of this powerup to 60%

in some casesis needed to cool servers. Data centers accounted for almost 2% of this countrys total energy con-

sumption, not to mention massive harmful carbon emissions.

These numbers have risen quickly, nearly 40% between 1999 and 2005, according to a survey by the Uptime

Institute, a provider of educational and consulting services. And they may double in the next five years to more

than 100 billion kilowatt-hours, according to the EPA.

Electricity, which is the lifeblood of data centers, is going up, says Andrew Fanara, product development team

leader for the EPA Energy Star program, a voluntary labeling program initiated in 1992 to promote energy efficiency

in products such as computer hardware. When demand for something goes up, prices go up. Weve been starting

to see that for quite a few years, and you probably can expect more of that in the future.

If your eyes are glazing over at these massive numbers, heres one from AFCOM, an association of data center pro-

fessionals, that will wake you up: Over the next five years, power failures and limits on power availability will halt

data center operations at more than 90% of all companies. Market researcher Gartner Inc. predicts 50% of IT man-

agers will not have enough power to run their data centers by 2008. Expect a rise in outages, along with a pressing

need to add more space and power to meet computing demands.

Faced with such an acute need, Vyas spent six months researching and crafting an energy-efficient data center

design. Everything from business-case analysis to power supplies to the local weather factored into the plan.





7/23

Emerging technologies, of course, played a major role. The new paradigms of blade servers and virtualization

forced us to revisit and change our design completely, from cooling to airflow to power requirements, Vyas says.

Today, Viejas Enterprises has one of the most energy-efficient data centers in the midmarket. The single-story data

center makes good use of blade servers and virtualization, giving it a high level of computing density. The layout

and air conditioning systems keep servers relatively cool. Backup generators are at the ready. The data center

draws electricity from a separate power line from the local utility. If the power line goes down, we immediately

switch to a UPS [uninterruptible power supply] and then, in a few seconds, switch to a generator, Vyas says.

The Vendor Challenge

Top tech vendors arent far behind the need to stem the tide of rising energy usage with server virtualization tools

and state-of-the-art server cooling services. Hewlett-Packard Co. began offering a service called thermal zone map-

ping to help customers identify airflows and mixing patterns inside the data center. The service creates a three-

dimensional image of a data center that shows the zones of influence of a computer room air conditioner (CRAC).

The services target customer is a company with 50 blade servers or 10 10-kilowatt racks.

These customers will run into heat and cost issues theyve never thought about before, says Brian Brouillette, a

vice president with HP Services. Average cost for the highest level of thermal zone mapping, including thermal sen-

sors: $100,000. Armed with this knowledge, CIOs can move CRACs and servers to achieve optimal cooling.

Meanwhile, at LinuxWorld in San Francisco this year, IBM announced that dozens of customers had bought IBM

tools that consolidate Unix and x86 workloads onto IBM System p servers. The tools aim to help customers such as

Volkswagen and Telefonica Moviles, a mobile operator in Spain, become more energy efficient. It balances better

for each service, each server, says Miguel Angel Garcia Hafner, technology manager for value-added services at

Telefonica Moviles.

HP and IBM have also launched massive data center consolidation projects of their own to lower energy costs and

contain carbon emissionsand to act as proof points for their energy-efficient offerings. HP consolidated 87 data

centers into six, while IBM plans to consolidate 3,900 servers onto 33 System z mainframes running Linux. Dubbed

Big Green, IBMs $1 billion project includes building a state-of-the-art data center in Colorado. Well double our

compute and data capacity without increasing our power consumption or carbon footprint, says Richard Lechner,

vice president of IT optimization at IBM.

The Green Light

HP and IBM are among the tech companies that have banded together this year to ride the green wave by forming

a nonprofit consortium, The Green Grid. The consortium is developing ways to measure and benchmark a data cen-

ters energy efficiency. Its a daunting task that covers many parts of energy consumption: CPUs, power supplies,

servers, applications, building construction and humidity, among others. In addition to standard data center energy

measurements, The Green Grid wants to create a green seal of approval for individual technology products, says

Colette LaForce, vice president of marketing at Rackable Systems Inc. and a Green Grid board member. Other

Green Grid members include Microsoft, Sun Microsystems Inc., Dell Inc., Intel Corp., Advanced Micro Devices Inc.

(AMD) and VMware Inc.





8/23

Green products can cost a bit more than traditional data center gear, but a range of products are now available,

says COO Wendy Cebula of VistaPrint Ltd., a $255 million printing company based in Bermuda. They include ener-

gy-efficient power supplies, voltage regulators and chips, such as more energy-efficient chipsets from Intel and

AMD (a CPU uses more than 50% of the power required to run a server, according to Eaton Corp., an electrical sys-

tems and component vendor). New UPS systems lose 70% less energy than older UPS systems at typical loads,

according to a Green Grid report.

Two years ago, VistaPrints data center hosting provider in Bermuda pressured the company to rethink its energy

usage because of the rising cost of energy. So, VistaPrint embraced virtual servers to reduce energy usage by 75%,

replaced year-old physical servers with energy-efficient ones and bought a set of air conditioners that push hot air

outside. We definitely accelerated investmentthe rollout of some of these changesto capture some of the green

benefits, Cebula says. VistaPrint expects to save nearly $500,000 over three years and reduce its output of carbon

emissions by several tons this year.

Indeed, server virtualization tops the list of best practices for saving energy in the data center (see Energy-saving

measures), as many CIOs have been able to consolidate virtual servers onto a handful of physical servers. Along

with blade servers from stalwarts IBM, HP and Dell, server virtualization tools from high-flyer VMware (whose IPO

this summer raised almost $1 billion) have lifted computing density to new heights.

Market researcher IDC predicts that 10% of all servers sold in the U.S. this year will be blades. Were seeing an

explosion of volume-density servers, with 2007 as a crossover year, says Jean Bozman, vice president of global

enterprise server solutions at IDC.

Unfortunately, advancements in power infrastructure havent kept up with data center technology. Batteries, gener-

ators and fire extinguishers look pretty much the same as they did decades ago. Data center power is 1940s tech-

nology, says Dr. Werner Vogels, vice president and CTO of Amazon.com. This means a data center has a finite

amount of available energy that wont change anytime soon. Thus, CIOs must find ways to improve server densities

and cooling techniques in order to take advantage of the limited space and reduce wasted energy.

On the server front, blade servers bring a high level of density and power efficiency to the data center. On average,

a blade chassis can hold eight to 16 blades. That density means the chassis exhausts a lot of heat in a very small

area. Airflow needs to be fast and have enough cooling concentration to keep blades from overheating. At 30 kilo-

watts of power per rack, a data center will need two five-ton CRACs for cooling, according to Eaton. Emerson

Network Power reports that cooling accounts for 37% of electricity usage within a well-designed data center.

A data center cannot run on blades alone because it would be impossible to cool. Even HP admits todays data cen-

ter tops out at around 35% blades, although the blade maker is working to double this figure through better man-

agement and cooling practices. If you dont focus on cooling, your data center could be unusable, says Vyas,

whose new data center contains 20% blades in five chassis. Within minutes all the servers will literally melt, espe-

cially the blade servers.

Viejas Enterprises new data center has raised floors and perforated tiles and is designed with hot and cold aisles. A

raised floor allows cold air to flow to hard-to-get-to areas. If more cooling is required for a specific aisle or group of





9/23

racks, existing tiles can be swapped for tiles with a higher percent of perforation. However, theres a limit to the

percentage because perforated tiles must be able to handle certain weight-load requirements.

Virtualization plays a key role in cooling, too. Its a key enabler not so much in the consolidation perspective but of

pooling resources and moving workloads from one system to another, IBMs Lechner says. This can eliminate a

hot spot or identify a system thats underutilized for long periods of time, so you move the remaining workload off

that system and shut it down completely and save the energy associated with it.

Then there are internal processes that keep in energy. Vyas data center has a separate room where staff members

prepare and test server applications, thus limiting the number of times anyone has to go into the actual server

room. Emerson Network Power advises CIOs to keep data center doors closed and use a vapor seal to control

humidity levels.

Creative Methods: From Cows to Roof Plants

Creative thinking about energy conservation is fast becoming part of a CIOs job. And theres no shortage of ideas,

from cow manures methane gas as a cheap energy source to natural cooling via retractable roofs. In fact, today

CIOs can tap winter air for free cooling through air economizer systems. Liquid cooling is also getting a second

look. And then there are solar panels to tap the sun for free energy.

For Web hosting company AISO.Net of Romoland, Calif., some 120 solar panels power water-cooled servers in its

data center. AISO.Net plans to grow drought-resistant plants on its roof to reduce cooling and heating requirements

by 50%. Weve always been green-minded and felt that this would be the right thing to do, says Phil Nail, CTO

and co-owner along with his wife, Sherry.

Besides embracing virtual servers, VistaPrint also decided to build a new data center in Windsor, Canada, wherehydroelectric power and square footage costs are 60% cheaper than in, say, Lexington, Mass., a location VistaPrint

considered. Green was a factor in choosing that location, Cebula says.

Tech giants are also building data centers near cheap power. Microsoft and Cisco are reportedly looking at Iceland

to erect mega data centers, tapping into the countrys geo-thermal and hydroelectric power. Google has built a data

center on the banks of the Columbia River in Oregon. Another technique is to move workloads to data centers in

different time zones to take advantage of lower utility rates throughout the day.

For midmarket CIOs considering a remote location to build a new data center, Aaron Branham, vice president of

technology and operations at VistaPrint, has some advice: Its cheaper to do it yourself if you have large enough

economies of scale and a solid growth plan. Startups tend to have less money than more mature companies [so] it

might not be possible to pay for a data center at this time. At the same time, picking a very small ISP to co-lo with

you could get you in trouble if you are growing rapidly. In general, if you know you are going to need more than 20

racks, it might make sense to do it yourself. A new data center costs around $2,500 per square foot, depending on

the location, says Paul Perez, vice president of scalable data center infrastructure at HP.





10/23

While a company can attain substantial energy cost savings from locating a data center near cheap power sources,

a CIO needs to consider other factors, such as telecom costs, the impact on the local economy and the availability

of IT talent, which is likely to be scarce in remote areas. There can also be latency issues; computer-based financial

trading institutions tend to shy away from remote data centers because of their latency. Microseconds count, says

James Houghton, vice president and head of utility product management at Wachovia Corp. VistaPrint also weighed

a laundry list of international concerns before settling on Canada, from tech support to the potential for natural and

geopolitical disasters.

Remote data centers, though, might not even be green at all. Critics claim that building a data center in an area

offering cheap hydroelectric power isnt completely environmentally friendly. For instance, dams on major rivers

harm salmon fisheries. The EPA has taken measures to remove dams on the Snake River. The bottom line: Taking

advantage of cheaper energy isnt the same as being energy efficient or green.

Regardless, most CIOs dont make green-based decisionsthey make greenback ones. In a recent Forrester

Research Inc. survey, 78% of 124 IT procurement and operations respondents throughout North America and

Europe said they dont write green IT into their evaluation and selection criteria for IT systems and devices. Of

course, a CIOs traditional goals are to help a company make money and cut costs in the process. Many green tech-

nologies just dont yet have the needed ROI. We cant build a data center that is completely energy efficient,

because we have a business to run, Vyas says.

Case in point: A facilities manager in the San Francisco Bay Area said that he recently looked into installing solar

panels at the behest of his CIO, but the high cost of retrofitting roofs to handle the weight of the proposed panels

quashed the idea. It wouldve taken years for lower energy costs to offset the retrofit, he says. Now the company

will consider solar panels only when building a new facility.

Water Cooling Redux

Credit Suisse takes a unique approach to water cooling: freezing ice at night during lower utility rates to use for

cooling during the day. The project was discussed during a panel on green projects at the Next Generation Data

Center event this summerand the audience scoffed that energy savings is not energy efficiency. All kinds of

people are saying all kinds of things, but they have to face facts, says Kfir Godrich, CTO of EYP Mission Critical

Facilities, which worked on the Credit Suisse project. Believe me, all these financial [institutions] are leaders in

what they are doing. If they are doing these kinds of things, its something the market should look at and learn

from in a positive way.

Either way, most CIOs wouldnt go back to water cooling for servers, given the risk of flooding. In a survey by

SearchDataCenter.com, 65% of respondents said they would never use liquid cooling in their data centers (see right).

Fred Stack, vice president of marketing at Liebert Precision Cooling, a part of Emerson Network Power, says most

CIOs wrongly equate water cooling with liquid cooling. For instance, liquid cooling can be Freon, which has 380

times the heat capacity of air, 40 times that of water. And if Freon leaks, it turns into a gas. When it comes to liq-

uid cooling, there must be a mind change, Stack says.





11/23

Another innovative approach to data center efficiency: a data center in a trailer. Sun Microsystems Blackbox and

Rackable Systems Concentro have already hit the market. While a trailer can be hauled to remote areas offering

cheap energy prices, the primary energy efficiency comes from an optimized density and cooling design. Known in

the industry as a closed loop, the data centers airflow is circulated rather than released outside. Rackable claims

that its self-contained cooling technology saves 80% in cooling costs over traditional methods. (Vyas considered

Concentro but felt the solution was too proprietary.)

Many forces are coming together to drive energy efficiencies in the data center, from cost savings to virtualization

and blade technology to the green movement thats sweeping the nation. Just as data center managers today

manage their data center for application availability, security and end-to-end transaction performance, we think that

moving forward they are going to have to manage energy optimization, IBMs Lechner says.

CIOs agree. Two out of five IT managers polled by IDC said that power and cooling was their top data center con-

cern this year, while availability and redundancy came in second. The utility bill, once solely the province of the

facilities manager, is now sometimes in the CIOs domain, or at the least, the CIO is accountable for its expense.

Our IT is considered a business unit. Energy cost is in the IT budget, not in facilities, says Vyas. For good or ill,

CIOs are now in the energy management business.

Best Practices in Energy Conservation

Many CIOs have been able to save energy or just cold hard cash by consolidating virtual servers onto a handful of

physical servers.

At $400 million St. Peters Health Care Services, 110 physical servers were virtualized and consolidated onto five

physical servers. At Agile (recently acquired by Oracle), hardware savings drove the virtualization move. Last year,

Sunny Azadeh, senior vice president of IT at Agile, was on the verge of purchasing 3,000 servers at $7,000 each.Instead, she implemented virtual servers using products from FastScale Technology and avoided the $2.1 million

cost, which over three years turned out to be 2 cents per share. While Azadeh personally wanted to avert the

impact that 3,000 servers would have on the environment (and the utility bill), she admits that capital spending

and good timing were the real green lights for the project.

Because a data centers inventory turns over every five years or so, CIOs have the opportunity to slowly transform

their data centers into energy-efficient ones. They can also adopt best practices to reduce energy usage right now.

The feeling is that there are a lot of easy opportunities out there, says Bill Tschudi, principal investigator for the

applications team at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, adding that 30% to 40% improvements is not too hard.

The Sleep Option

One practice among many is to put servers to sleep, much like a screen saver. A typical x86 server consumes

30% to 40% of maximum power even when producing no work at all, according to Eaton Corp., an electrical

systems and component vendor. Of course, powering down a server even at night requires some forethought about

application spikes and availability. Peter Boergermann of Citizens & Northern Bank in Wellsboro, Pa., warns that

sleep mode on servers could disrupt a data centers ability to maintain levels of service, as servers power up and





12/23

down. Obviously, if youre standing away from the PC and go away to a meeting and it goes into sleep mode, its

not a big deal, he says. But if you start turning sleep mode on with servers, that can cause you some problems.

Another good practice is to make sure power supplies are properly sized for the load. IT equipment is rated to work

with input power voltages ranging from 100 volts to 240 volts of alternating current, yet most equipment runs off

lower voltage power. Eaton, for example, says an HP ProLiant DL380 Generation 5 server operates at 82% efficien-

cy at 120 volts, 84% at 208 volts, and 85% at 230 volts.

A power supply is most efficient when its used as close to its capacity as possible, says Paul Hammann, data cen-

ter architect at Powerset, a developer of a natural language search engine. These energy-saving techniques dont

seem like much, he says, but they all add up.

The EPA Weighs In

Late last year, Congress asked the EPA to study energy consumption in data centers. This summer the EPA deliv-ered its 133-page report, Report to Congress on Server and Data Center Energy Efficiency, Public Law 109-431,

authored by researchers from the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab.

The report contains guidelines, not regulations or recommendations for legislation. Industry watchers believe the

EPA has little interest in regulating data centers. The EPAs next step is to develop metrics that help CIOs bench-

mark their energy consumption and policies.

The report suggests that CIOs can reduce a typical servers energy usage by 25% or more through existing tech-

nologies and design strategies, such as server virtualization. The EPA recommends voluntary tax incentive programs

to drive adoption of best practices and calls for the federal government to challenge CEOs to conduct energy-effi-

ciency assessments, implement improvements and report energy performance in their data centers on a voluntarybasis. Every data center should have a meter on it, says Andrew Fanara, Energy Star product development team

leader at the EPA. We feel that all we need is a little dose of competition, not regulation.

Mixed Reviews

The report has received mixed reactions: Some think it went too far, others not far enough.

Robert McFarlane, data center consultant and president of Interport, a division of Shen, Milsom & Wilke Inc., a tech-

nology consultancy, is an outspoken critic of Congress legislative track record on technology issues and believes the

report gives politicians an easy target. Since we have no real energy policy in this country, this gives Congress and

the president an opportunity to push policy that looks good, especially in an election year, and blame the helpless,namely the people running the data centers, he says.

Yet Rakesh Kumar, analyst at market research firm Gartner, says, We were looking for a stronger carrot and much

bigger stick. ... The tax incentives are marginal and there should be, in our opinion, some threat of legislation.





13/23

Peter Boergermann of Citizens & Northern Bank in Wellsboro, Pa., is wary of seeing yellow Energy Star stickers

slapped on servers. He believes the tech industry, particularly software vendors, should take the lead in reducing

power consumption. Many of his issues are inside the box: Just scrolling through a window causes one of his appli-

cations to use 100% of its server capacity, for instance. The critical application, which manages property appraisals,

also cant be virtualized lest it get bogged down fighting for resources with other virtualized applications.

Lets make applications more efficient, Boergermann says. It needs to go back to the development stage so that

applications are written that are green.

Energy-Saving Measures

A recent survey of 374 data center managers conducted by SearchDataCenter.com found that lack of space was the

most significant limiting factor for a companys data center growth, followed by power capacity, network bandwidth

and cooling capacity. On the energy-saving front, the results were as follows:

50%+ said they have saved energy through server virtualization.

32% had made efforts to improve under-floor air conditioning efficiency.

17.5% had implemented power-down features on servers not in use.

11% had tried direct current power in the data center.

7.7% had tried liquid cooling for increased data center cooling efficiency.

27% hadnt taken any measures to minimize their data center power usage.





14/23


Systems and Services Energy efficiency Management

Security Virtualization Automation

HP Adaptive InfrastructureKey enablers of your next-generation data center

HP Adaptive Infrastructure enables customers to:

Lower the cost of IT operations

Deliver higher quality of service with less risk

Accelerate the speed of IT change for greater flexibility

www.hp.com/go/ai


15/23


By Linda Tucci, Senior News Writer

12 Oct 2007 | SearchCIO.com

ORLANDO, Fla.Protecting the environment has become part of ITs job. Managing your organizations metadata

should be high on the IT agenda. But the Weband the new computing models its spawnedlooms large on

Gartner Inc.s list of 10 strategic technologies for 2008.

Strategic technologies, as defined by Stamford, Conn.-based Gartner, are technologies that could disrupt IT or busi-

ness in the next 18 to 36 months. They may require a large dollar investment and could cripple your organization if

adopted too late. In other words, these technologies carry a high potential to shake up your job, big time. Heres

what should be on your radar now, with comments from Gartner analyst Carl Claunch:

Green IT. Here to stay. Regulations are multiplying and could constrain plans to build new data centers. Learn about

potential compliance regulations and form an alternate strategy for adding data centers. Dont get on the wrong

side of the boss, shareholders or marketing.

Many companies, from Dell Inc. to Sole Technology Inc., a small Lake Forest, Calif.-based maker of skateboard

footwear, are touting Green IT as a component of the company mission. Make no mistake, the software that sched-

ules which applications should run where will and must factor in server energy efficiency. In the meantime: When

you are at a peak period and using everything, you have no choice. During the times when you are not totally

maxed out, turn off the ones that are the worst energy hogs, Claunch said.

Unified communications. Twenty percent of companies that used to rely on private branch exchange (PBX) have

migrated to IP telephony. But the times, they are achangin.

More than 80% of companies are doing trials of IP telephony. In three years, a majority of companies will be using

it, Gartner predicts. And no wonder, when even things like video security cameras have become digital, Claunch

said. This is the first major change in voice communications since the digital PBX and cellular phone changes in the

1970s and 1980s.

Business process modeling. The imperative for 2008 for this perennial list maker is to bring enterprise architects,

senior developers, process architects and process analysts together to jointly define top-level process services. The

modeling goal is faster and highly flexible processes. Think Legos. If the business decides it wants to change how it

charges for products for two months, IT should be able to get into the process, change it and change it back when

required, Claunch said.

Metadata management. A jargon-rich discipline (or lack of discipline, unfortunately) that nonetheless is a critical

technology going forward. If your aim is to have the ability to re-hook the IT systems to rapidly support any

change your business might make, then youre talking about connections you dont know in advance, Claunch said.

You need clean and consistent data to do that. Metadata management is part of the magic sauce to that.





16/23

Virtualization 2.0. This is a change in peoples recognition of the scope of what virtualization can do, Claunch said.

Virtualization is not just about shedding serversdisaster recovery is a good example. Suddenly, putting in 10

backup machines for 10 production machines is a crude and expensive strategy.

Also just emerging, courtesy of virtualization: A new distribution model for applications. Instead of selling and

shipping just the application to you, the software supplier might send you a virtual machine file that has every-

thing, the OS and the application, pre-integrated, Claunch said. So less work for you, and the vendor doesnt have

to test all the combinations. Cautions? Licensing issues have to be sorted out before pre-integrated applications

become widespread. And youll have to run herd on vendors to make sure patches are updated.

Mashup and composite applications. Web mashups will be the dominant model (80%) for creating composite enter-

prise applications by 2010. Why? They allow you to rapidly tailor the functionality you want in one place, without

having to re-create the original, Claunch said.

Mashups will replace internal portals for employees, who now have to flip between applications to get what they

need. Businesses will use mashups to talk to customers about their orders. You get the tracking information from

FedEx, the map from Google, stick in on the same page with your data and now what the customer sees is a pic-

ture of a little plane with her order, Claunch said. And the licensing issues here? Once you make a service that is

available and open and doesnt require registration, I think it will be difficult to talk about terms and conditions that

are hidden in a contract five screens down.

Web platform and Web-oriented architecture (WOA). Forget the acronym, Claunch said. The idea is this: Software

as a Service (SaaS) is forcing companies to evaluate where service-based delivery will add value from 2008 to

2010. Meanwhile, emerging Web platforms are offering service-based access to infrastructure, information, applica-

tions and business processes through Web-based cloud computing environments. Now is the time to look beyond

SaaS and examine how Web platforms will change their business in three to five years.

Computing fabric. Five years ago, you bought a server. Inside there was one motherboard with a particular number

of processors, some amount of memory and I/O connections. You got the mix the vendor built. You needed tons of

memory and not much processor? Too bad. Blade servers helped. The next step in this progression, Gartner says,

treats memory, processors and I/O cards as components in a pool, combining and recombining them into particular

arrangements to suits the owners needs. You use the fabric to hook them anyway you want, Claunch said. Thats

really a revolution.

For example, a large server can be created by combining 32 processors and a number of memory modules from the

pool, operating together over the fabric to appear to an operating system as a single fixed server. The enabling

technology is the switch that got fast enough to make it feasible. Its things like InfiniBand that make it possible,

Claunch said.

Real World Web. The Real World Web delivers augmented reality as opposed to virtual reality, in real time, not

before or after the fact. It gives tripping a whole new meaning. So, the GPS navigation unit, for example, gives





17/23

real-time directions that react to events and movements. Now is the time to look for how to cash in on augmenting

the world at the right time, place or situation.

Social software. The Web version of mob mentality, the collective conscious, the wisdom of crowdswhatever you

want to call itis coming to a workplace near you. Web 2.0 products such as wikis, RSS feeds and tagging will be

used to communicate and foster collaboration in your company. Expect a shakeout as vendors big, small and just-

born strive to deliver robust Web 2.0 offerings to business.





18/23


Storage Servers

Services Software

HP Adaptive InfrastructureBuilding blocks of your next-generation data center


Lower the cost of IT operations Deliver higher quality of service with less risk

Accelerate the speed of IT change forgreater flexibility

www.hp.com/go/ai4AA16067ENW


19/23


By Linda Tucci, Senior News Writer

09 Oct 2007 SearchCIO.com

George White, CIO for the Pennsylvania Office of Attorney General, moved the offices mission-critical IT into the

virtual world, switching out 150 old, standalone servers for 50 Dell Inc. blade servers and VMware Inc. virtualization

software.

It was scary in the sense it was new technology for us, White said. The results were so positive, in cost savings

and performance, that he plans to implement virtualization at the offices remote disaster recovery site starting this

spring. Were taking virtualization in a building-block manner.

The CIO from Pennsylvania is not alone.

Six months ago, when the subject of virtualization raised its seductive head, the talk among midmarket CIOs was all

about shedding pounds, said analyst Jim Browning, who covers the midmarket at Gartner Inc. in Stamford, Conn.

They took their 30 servers and cut them down to 20, saved $50,000 and felt good about themselves, Browning

said. Then they quickly realize virtualization can be used for other things.

At a recent gathering of some 350 midmarket CIOs in Palm Springs, Calif., Browning noted that virtualization is increas-

ingly being used as a vehicle for affordable disaster recoveryand the troops are feeling even better about themselves.

Midmarket CIOs have been getting a lot of pressure for years for improving disaster recovery, Browning said.

They are taking some of those servers they shut down, virtualizing them and putting them in some remote loca-

tion and actually replicating applications. Email and ERP are the applications I hear about most often.

Disaster recovery in the physical world is hard for midmarket companies. A company looking to set up a second

recovery site needs to duplicate its hardware. That is certainly expensive, especially if you live by the rule of one

application per server. Maintaining a second site more than doubles the trouble. Every patch job at the primary site

requires a patch at the secondary one. The third-party providers that can make disaster recovery less painful for

big enterprises are too expensive for many midmarket companies.

As the cost of IP networks, ISCI and disk-to-disk backups have become more affordable, disaster recovery-by-virtu-

alization is growing in popularity, said Browning and others. VMware is a rock star to them right now. Browning

said, referring to the Palo Alto, Calif.-based market leader. In fact, virtualization and VMware are interchangeable.

Theyre using VMware as a verb.

Because of budget constraints, White wasnt able to duplicate the server environment, traditionally or virtually, at

the secondary site. But the foundation is in place. We implemented a dual storage area network at our primary site





20/23

in Harrisburg, the capital, and our discovery recovery site in State College, Pa. From a storage standpoint, the pri-

mary site is mirrored up to the disaster recovery site at regular intervals, White said.

In the meantime, White has implemented clustering within the on-site environment, as well as dynamic failover

capabilities so in the event of a problem, the virtual machines will automatically revert to an area that is working

properly. Live migration capabilities mean we can manually move environments around to do routine maintenance

without disrupting users, White said. Were using a combination of technologies locally as a stopgap solution until

we can have a full-scale virtualized environment deployed at our DR site.

Mike Carvalhos embrace of virtualization required a big shove from above. The CTO of Radiator Express Warehouse

Inc. (1-800-Radiator), Carvalho has been working in IT since 1981, when he joined the U.S. Air Force. I can be stuck

in my old ways, he said. So when a buddy took him out to lunch to sing the praises of virtualization, I said, Man,

youre not going to sell me on that, Carvalho recalled. I bit into the model of one physical sever for one application.

Problem was, his company was adding franchisees at a rate of two a week and the data center was running out of

power and flat out of space. 1-800-Radiator is a privately held automotive parts distributor in Benecia, Calif., that

does approximately $80 million in revenue. Part of the franchisee deal is that the companys headquarters manages

all the IT for its 200-some locations. I analyzed what it would cost to keep up with the pace of growth, given the

number of servers I was adding, and put together a quote. My CEO says, Were not going to spend that; go find

another solution.

It took three weeks to virtualize 31 servers, using products from VMware. Power consumption was cut by 25%.

Then another light bulb went off. Like many midmarket companies, 1-800-Radiator didnt have much in the way of

a disaster recovery strategy.

We had a couple of MetaFrame servers sitting in a colo someplace and we were going to use a DOS application for

disaster recovery, Carvalho said.

Instead, he took some of the money he saved on physical servers and bought three more VMware servers. Only

critical business functionsload balancers, Web servers, database servers and so onare replicated, so I was able

to duplicate everything I needed in two racks, he said. We staged it, we built it and started testing it. Today my

disaster recovery site is 24/7 live. The remote location is unmanned, another attractive feature of the virtualized

environment. Carvalho uses the VMware management tool to tend the servers and the operating systems, and Im

doing it all over a WAN, he said.

VMWares High Availability is enabled on all servers at both locations. The VMotion tool, which automatically moves

a virtual machine from one server to another as needed, is deployed judiciously on noncritical servers, because I

dont want the risk of any corruption, Carvalho said.

What he likes best about the disaster recovery solution, he said, is that it is constantly being tested. His staff

monitors the networks using the latest Pro version of IPSwitcher from Softmate Corp. The disaster recovery servers

are checked every 60 seconds. My guy makes sure the Web sites come up, and I know the software code is cur-

rent. I can go home and sleep, is what it comes down to. I am not worried about disaster recovery.





21/23

A good nights sleep may be the result, but cost savings was the primary driver.

It took the situation I describeda lack of resourcesto actually see it, Carvalho said. The company wants to

grow. My job is to make sure it can grow the way it wants to. We cant say, OK were not going to grow this week,

because Mike has decided we dont have the resources. Theyre going to find somebody else who does.





22/23


HP BladeSystem HP Integrity

HP ProLiant HP StorageWorks

www.hp.com/go/ai

HP Adaptive InfrastructureBuilding blocks of your next-generation data center


Lower the cost of IT operations

Deliver higher quality of service with less risk

Accelerate the speed of IT change forgreater flexibility

4AA16068ENW


23/23

Resources from HP

Adaptive InfrastructureDelivering the next-generation data center to optimize business outcomes

VirtualizationReduce costs, increase agility, improve quality of IT service delivery

AutomationOptimizing IT to move from maintenance to value innovation

About HP

Many in the industry have been talking about the next-generation data center (NGDC) trend. A NGDC helps create

an environment that brings together the compute power, applications and information assets to deliver IT services

to the business. It is standardized, virtualized, automated and energy-efficient.

Join us via this online webinar, as we explore approaches and technologies for building a next-generation data

center and provide practical advice about how you can build a roadmap to your next-generation data center to

optimize business outcomes.

Building a roadmap to our next-generation data centerWebinar replay Nov 07

www.hp.co

Microsoft DFS: Leveraging the Benefits and Filling the Gaps

Resources from HP
http://ad.doubleclick.net/clk;183265795;10405922;i?http://www.hp.com/go/aihttp://ad.doubleclick.net/clk;183267743;10405922;d?http://h71028.www7.hp.com/enterprise/cache/454414-0-0-0-121.aspxhttp://ad.doubleclick.net/clk;183268731;10405922;b?http://h71028.www7.hp.com/enterprise/cache/325416-0-0-225-121.htmlhttp://ad.doubleclick.net/clk;183328067;10405922;a?https://event.on24.com/eventRegistration/EventLobbyServlet?target=registration.jsp&eventid=94945&sessionid=1&key=8C8C7FBD3A64132C1D7C6437D453808B&sourcepage=registerhttp://ad.doubleclick.net/clk;183269955;10405922;k?http://www.hp.comhttp://ad.doubleclick.net/clk;183265795;10405922;i?http://www.hp.com/go/aihttp://ad.doubleclick.net/clk;183267743;10405922;d?http://h71028.www7.hp.com/enterprise/cache/454414-0-0-0-121.aspxhttp://ad.doubleclick.net/clk;183268731;10405922;b?http://h71028.www7.hp.com/enterprise/cache/325416-0-0-225-121.htmlhttp://ad.doubleclick.net/clk;183328067;10405922;a?https://event.on24.com/eventRegistration/EventLobbyServlet?target=registration.jsp&eventid=94945&sessionid=1&key=8C8C7FBD3A64132C1D7C6437D453808B&sourcepage=registerhttp://ad.doubleclick.net/clk;183269955;10405922;k?http://www.hp.com

Chief Info Officers Guide to Green IT

Documents

Transcript of Chief Info Officers Guide to Green IT