Getting Greener with Better Performance

I was reading a blog by Lilac Berniker Fortisphere where she talks about virtualization and green.

I agree with much of what she said, personally I think that Green has taken a back burner in the economy, lower gas prices have definitely taken the pressure off transport and people are afraid to sign up for the typically higher acquisition costs associated with the “green solution” and instead are trying to spend less. One of the great things about Online Demos like our TestDrive Solutions is that they are much greener than printing thousands of CDs or mailers and sending out – it’s all online.

I have been looking at our data center costs and analyzing what new hardware we are going to need over the coming months as business grows and her article was very relevant. We have many servers that are underutilized, but we always have to be ready for those unexpected spikes in demand or a failure in one of our data centers. Because of our need to always be able to support all our users if we suffered a catastrophic failure in one of the two data centers, we probably will never be able safely to go beyond 50% utilization of hardware, but we could still improve by an order of magnitude the usage on some servers.

The majority of our servers are 2U 2CPU rack mounted servers, the majority running Windows Server 2003 x64. We still keep some running x86 because of application compatibility issues which limits the usage on those servers. We’ve been playing around with blade servers for a while now and they definitely qualify for a green status, they use less power and air conditioning than our current servers, but have 2 main disadvantages for us – the limited internal storage and the risk of an enclosure failure (which is very low, but would take out many servers). Moving our entire infrastructure to a virtual based one will allow us to overcome all these issues, and once we complete more performance testing and make sure that our management platform is equipped to maximize the benefit and track the virtual servers, we will make the move. For now though I am, like I expect most companies are, looking to be green without additional cost, so optimization of existing hardware is the plan for now.

Virtual servers should allow us to give a better service to our customers and at the same time reduce our environmental impact!