When setting up an IT infrastructure, usually its
environmental impact is overlooked. Initial cost, performance, compatibility
and maintenance are usually the major points that are taken under
consideration. As the number of server equipments increase, energy consumption
also increases. Overall, using more server equipments would mean higher cooling
expenses in the server room, higher energy consumption, higher server support costs
and higher maintenance costs.
IT market leaders such as Dell, Sun Microsystems and others have
formed a non-profit organization called “The Green Grid” to promote the
efficiency at the consumption level of IT equipments. Similarly SPEC, another
organization formed by Oracle, IBM and HP, conducts research to help comparing
energy saving practices in IT organizations such as data centers, server rooms.
Both of these organizations along with other market leaders
recommend virtualization as an energy conservative practice.
Virtualization is basically allowing multiple server software to run on a
single server hardware. The result is reduced number of server hardware, less
cooling expense, less energy consumption and less floor space.
Virtualization projects promote server consolidations that
lead the way for better management for the servers and lower maintenance costs.
This is, of course, by itself not a sufficient effort for environment friendly IT
operations but it is an important measure toward the right direction.
Vedat YOZKAT
