Build A Green Data Centre And Save Costs!

Few information technology directions have been as brightly positioned in the spotlight as sustainability, or “green IT” – and for good reason: unlike the latest advances in performance or programming methodology, resource utilisation and environmental impact goes beyond the walls of the data centre and affects everyone, not just technologists.

As optimal utilisation becomes more and more a matter of long-term survival, the technologies that make it possible in the long run to save our planet also can help bring financial savings today.

Businesses should consider the following technology approaches that can make it more efficient and cost-effective to deliver the applications their users and operations require.

• Deliver, don’t install, applications. When applications and operating systems are installed at every desktop and on every server, there are obvious costs to the environment: disk storage is one of the most power-hungry components of the IT infrastructure, both to operate and to cool. (For every dollar spent to keep a computing resource running, the utility industry estimates another 80 cents spent to cool it.) If applications are stored in the data centre and delivered over the network to the desktop, it can lead to reductions in storage cost and also yield dramatic savings in power and cooling cost. These savings apply not only to typical desktop productivity applications, but also to the user interface and client-side intelligence for enterprise applications such as Oracle’s application server product lines.

• As go the applications, so goes the operating system. Citrix has long brought the benefits of delivery to the application; now the same economies of scale and management can be achieved by operating systems. In addition to the storage savings (which translate to power, cooling, and real estate sustainability gains), this move could also mean less maintenance, less patching – and greatly reduced requirements for the fuel needed to get IT staff to support desktops in the field.

• More dynamic means more sustainable. Data centre costs are driven by the servers and storage that support the backbone of business processes. When data centre resources can be automatically directed to the high-value business activities that require them, resources can be used more effectively, and business can do much more with much less. While server virtualisation can drive the consolidation and flexibility that businesses require, fewer than ten percent of servers are currently used as virtualised platforms. To drive dynamic resource utilisation and reduce overprovisioning, dynamic management must be applied to both physical and virtual resources.

By taking advantage of these principles of efficiency, investment in the future of the IT infrastructure and the business can also be an investment in the future of the planet.

_Souma Das is Area Vice President at Citrix India.
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