The virtual buzz

As Australia’s ICT industry scrambles to become more environmentally friendly, the proliferation of buzzwords and vendor hype is making many see red instead of Green.

Despite a lack of government leadership beyond the symbolic ratification of the Kyoto Protocol, Australian businesses are expressing immense interest in going Green.

Analyst firm Gartner has identified Green IT as the number one strategic technology and trend for most organisations in 2008.

Driving much of the buzz around Green IT is a growing number of vendors trumpeting virtualisation as an easy and cost-effective way for organisations to reduce their carbon footprint, while also cutting costs.

Virtualisation comes in many flavours, ranging from server and desktop solutions to storage and network offerings. At its very simplest, virtualisation is an attempt to maximise the utilisation of available computing resources. This is most commonly achieved by placing a software-based “virtual machine” between a hardware platform and an operating system.

This abstraction layer, often referred to as a hypervisor, completely emulates the capabilities of the hardware on which it is running. It effectively creates a clone of the hardware itself, making it possible to run multiple instances of an application or operating system on a single physical machine.

Virtualisation has its roots in mainframe computing in the 1970s. Largely a dormant technology, it has recently risen to the fore as a response to the hangover of cheap x86 servers in the ‘80s and ‘90s. Twenty years ago, the decision by IT managers around the world to install servers whenever a new application was needed seemed perfectly legitimate given the low cost of procuring and maintaining these servers. As a result data centres were soon filled with a cornucopia of application, print, database, web, file and mail servers.

Unfortunately, data centre space and power grid capacity is finite, and this proliferation of servers began to eat up the available real estate and send power, maintenance and administration costs skyrocketing.

These costs have brought the problem into sharp focus and provided virtualisation vendors with almost limitless opportunities to ply their virtualisation solutions.

Initial efforts around virtualisation have been directed at the data centre. The enterprise data centre is typically considered the largest culprit when it comes to harming the environment. As one of the principal users of energy, optimising servers in data centres through virtualisation technology is often seen as the easiest and most effective way for a company to slash its energy bills and transition into Green IT.

When thinking about virtualisation it is important to be aware of the direct linear relationship between the use of power and the production of carbon dioxide. With 80 percent of Australia’s electricity generated by coal-fired power stations, any technology that can reduce the amount of power used by computers will also have a direct effect on reducing carbon dioxide emissions.

Research conducted by the Australian Computer Society indicates that each server removed from a data centre represents a yearly reduction of more than three tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions. With many organisations routinely running scores of servers, the carbon footprint savings gained by virtualising can be significant.

According to Paul Harapin, managing director of VMware Australia and New Zealand, one of the most common factors driving virtualisation uptake in the local market is power grid capacity limits.

"We’ve had customers who have been told you can’t put any more computing capacity into the building because the power grid can’t power it."

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