The virtual buzz

Besides being extremely hungry for power, servers are also becoming increasingly expensive to run. After the initial capital expenditure, an average two CPU server costs an IT department around $2000 per annum in electricity to run and cool.

With the price of power continuing to rise and as yet unknown financial penalties set to be introduced with the Federal Government’s emissions trading scheme, Harapin said that businesses without a plan to reduce their server power consumption will find themselves facing increasing financial hardship.

“The cost of power is going up exponentially and will do so over the next few years, while the cost of computing is getting cheaper. That means that the cost of power is becoming one of the most expensive components of computing.”

With more than 5000 Australian customers, VMware is considered to be at the forefront of server virtualisation technology. VMware has virtualised more than 86 percent of the Australian Stock Exchange’s top 100 companies and earlier this year inked a three-year deal to license its virtualisation products and support to more than 45 universities and higher education institutions in Australia and New Zealand.

According to Harapin, virtualisation has become a key driver for those corporations looking to become more environmentally responsible.

“Virtualisation is certainly gaining significantly greater traction. Is it the number one topic on an organisation’s board agenda? Probably not. But is it one of the important topics? Absolutely.”

Rob Willis, area vice president Australia and New Zealand at Citrix Systems, claims that virtualising the data centre provides businesses with a valuable tool for controlling their power consumption.

“Virtualisation offers the opportunity for people to really reduce their power consumption and to manage power consumption more than they are doing today. It allows for a lot more flexibility and control over the use of power in the data centre,” he said.

Server virtualisation plays an important role in power management. When employees finish their working day and go home for the evening, the utilisation of servers in a data centre drops dramatically.

Traditional data centres continue to leave servers running around the clock, irrespective of demand. By using distributed power management tools, mission-critical workloads can be consolidated onto a footprint of servers with sufficient capacity to run the applications. The remaining servers can then be powered down until they need to be brought back online the following morning.

Using virtualisation technology, it is possible to consolidate the workloads of 10 or 12 servers onto a single server. The advantages of this level of reduction are obvious and compelling.

Besides clear benefits such as cutting power costs and reducing an organisation’s carbon footprint, an important consequence of virtualisation is the opportunity to reduce server support infrastructure.

Servers are housed in racks – the more servers a company has the more racks are needed. With racks comes the need for UPS systems to protect against unexpected power failure. More network devices are also needed to allow users to connect and utilise the applications hosted on each server. Of course, these devices must all be cooled by precision airconditioning units.

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