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Some hard truths have led to a heated debate on global warming where people have no choice but to sit up and take notice. Tonnes of thousands of hazardous wastes, over consumption of natural resources, and growing levels of obnoxious gases are depleting the delicate equilibrium of our environment. Increasing use of technology is seen as a contributor to the growing problem.

Green data centers is perhaps the most talked about subject when it comes to green initiatives in technology and infrastructure. The energy consumption in data centers has been going up with every passing year, and therefore the need to treat it as a business issue. Telecom operators want to spend less on fuel. Green data centers are one of the options.

Energy is a major concern especially in developing countries like India where there is a power crisis. The alternative options, like using gensets, are increasing carbon emissions. Within a data center where there is huge consumption of power, and subsequently emission of heat by large servers, virtualization of networks and consolidation of server play a vital role making data centers greener.

Need for Green Data Centers
Data centers today consume a substantial percentage of generated power for any country and the scenario is no different in India. Many data center companies like VMware strongly believe that green data centers have become very important because they are eco-friendly and add to the business as well. With innovations like virtualization it becomes possible to avoid expensive data center upgrades and real estate expansions required to meet high power and cooling requirements. Ganesh Mahabala, regional director, India & SAARC, VMware says, “In a hot country like India, companies mainly rely on air-conditioning to keep servers at the right temperature. The more powerful the machine, greater the need for cool air to keep it from overheating.” And that of course translates into more carbon emissions.

Virtualization has now become one of the most powerful drivers of Green. Data center infrastructure is central to IT architecture and all content is sourced through it. Proper planning of infrastructure design is critical for which attributes like performance, resiliency, and scalability need to be carefully considered. Designing a flexible architecture that has the ability to support new applications in a short time frame can result in significant competitive advantage. It becomes very important to move towards virtualization, as huge power consumption results in huge waste of natural resources. With this move, data centers would go toward reducing power consumption by an enormous 30 to 40% and in some cases by 50%.

Virtual Better than Real
As data centers run an array of computing, storage and networks infrastructure, the system creates management challenges and strains resources. The requirement comes to automate them to run smartly and efficiently. Network virtualization technology is an important tool to develop the same. Cisco's Storage Area Network (SAN) technology's strategic design would help to improve scalability and improve performance.

This new technology simplifies SAN management, increasing data security and also enhances SAN services in Virtual Machines (VM) environments. A combination of three 8 Gbps fiber channel switching modules and operating system with better capabilities called NX-OS will be adopted in Cisco's move to provide managers with a single operating system and a unified data center fabric. This would not only simplify data center management but also help in reducing cost. According to Sumit Makhija, national sales manager, data centers, Cisco India and SAARC, “By virtualizing the resources of a data center, an enterprise can offer services across the globe from a single centralized data center, thereby reducing operational cost and increasing asset effectiveness.”

Network virtualization would blend the economics and efficiencies of shared systems with the integrity, performance and security of independent systems. Virtualization switches deliver a range of networking and security functions such as firewall and intrusion detection, on one physical hardware platform. Network administrators can configure, deploy and manage these functions as if they were separate devices. According to PK Saji, VP, global infrastructure operation, Sify, “It also helps in deploying the right hardware or the right application; meaning cheap storage devices would be sufficient for off-line storage and less intensive applications where higher end technology can be deployed for real time applications which has a high IO.” Virtualization also enables sharing of resources and consolidation of servers, storage and a lot of other data center solutions.

Consolidation of Servers
Consolidation of servers helps the enterprise to use lesser number of disks thereby reducing the power consumption for data centers. Server consolidation came as a milestone in the history of data centers. It came across as a killer application as it was the only way to tame the server sprawl. During the 1990s and the 2000s low-cost 'one application per server' approach increased low utilization and high hardware and operational costs. This resulted in servers being no different from gas guzzling SUVs.

Mahabala says, “Thousands of customers from small organizations to global enterprises have eliminated 90% or more of the servers in their data center, improved utilization rates of the remaining servers from 5-15% before to 60-80% now, and doubled or tripled their server-to-administrator ratios.” These reduced the hardware and operating costs by as much as 50% and at the same time accelerated the provisioning time for new servers by up to 70%. This in turn led to greener technologies, cutting data center power consumption by 80-90% and radically reducing CO2 emissions.

Apart from consolidation of servers, compression methods and grid computing were adopted to reduce the space constraints. Oracle's advanced compression technology, Oracle Database 11g Enterprise Edition helps in managing the growing amounts of data in a very cost-effective manner. According to Seema Ambastha, director, technology sales consulting, Oracle India, “Compression methods help in compressing any type of data, including structured and unstructured data such as documents, images, and multimedia, as well as network traffic and data in the process of being backed up. It uses lesser disk space and power, helping it run faster and making the planet a little greener.”

Matters of Concern
With a very different usage pattern, data centers consume steady state power throughout the day. Measures are being taken so that data centers can move toward minimum power and maximum computation can be achieved leading to minimum usage of resources. “PUE is a new yardstick for measuring the effective usage of power within the data center which gives a good comparison on power used by the IT fabric with other devices like cooling, etc” says PK Saji.

Electricity is not the only reason to worry. Due to extended use of Internet activity many communications service providers are shifting or relocating the content to this side of the globe and India is considered to be a strong contender for data center services.

Green data centers with low power consumption and better storage capacity would be the drivers for better business. By adopting green initiatives in data centers it would be another step toward better living in this age of technology.

Sunny Sen
sunnys@cybermedia.co.in