Make Dramatic Cuts In Bills And Carbon

As data centres across the globe continue to consume increasing amounts of energy, Paul O’Donnell, sales director of data management storage solutions company Aegis IT, looks at the options available to reduce bills and the rising carbon footprint.

The role of a Chief Information Officer (CIO) has always been a difficult balancing act. This act has become increasingly complicated by rising costs and fears over the economy. Power costs and power supply are issues that have never before been on the agenda of CIOs. However, this new pressure of increasing energy costs and corporate objectives to reduce the carbon footprint is forcing them to consider their options.


In larger organisations with monolithic data centres a sleeping giant of a problem is the availability of power to the data centre. The problem reached fever pitch recently when a rumour circulated that a number of blue chips were moving data centres away from Docklands because any spare capacity in the grid will be used for the London Olympics.

These combined pressures have meant the power savings programs are now on the agenda of CIOs.

On a small scale, there are a number of obvious things that can be done to reduce power consumption, like turning off PC’s at night.

But the Data Centre cannot be turned off and there are no power saving features in a server. So where do you start? There are three main areas to consider: data and storage, backup and servers.

Data growth is now exponential. But, data usage as a percentage of the amount of data stored is going down.

So while many businesses have already bought archiving software, for many companies this simply means moving data from fast, highly available storage on to fast highly available storage with a bigger disk.

So the net result may be a saving of a couple of disks to a tray, but this is not going to reduce your carbon footprint by much, as all this storage is always on and always using power. Secondly, this has historically only been available for file and email in the main stream.

However, there are now sensibly priced storage solutions from Nexsan and COPAN that allow companies to move data from ‘always on’ storage to power managed devices.

These platforms also act as targets for backup to disk and compliance and there are some interesting integration features coming with Oracle. So dormant customer records can moved to near line, power friendly platforms at last.

Backups have always been a dark science. De-duplication at both the file and block level will help reduce the amount of data being backed up. Good due diligence will help reduce the amount of total data, and this can save 75% of the power previously consumed by tape if combined with a disk-to-disk solution.

This is good from an internal politics angle, big wins by reducing the number of lorries collecting and delivering tapes. This reduces the bill from Iron Mountain and you can give your environmental officer a tangible deliverable back to the business.

The last area that has real benefit is virtualisation. Virtualisation works like this. Your server is a big empty lorry. Your application is a can of baked beans. Would you deliver one can of baked beans in one lorry?

No, you put many cans in one lorry. Virtualisation allows you to run many applications on one server, reducing the costs of hardware and saving power.

Many companies Aegis works with have tested virtualisation. Yet not as many companies have it in a live production environment as you might think.

Why? For some companies it’s risk, for others Dell keeps coming up with such good deals every quarter, why bother?

Aegis is now working on an increasing number of projects where the exclusive drivers are space and air conditioning. Customers like the Freeman Hospital, Newcastle had 70 servers that we managed to reduce to just eight.

This has real benefits on a number of levels. From a power, air conditioning and space perspective it has almost become a no-brainer.

And, like data assessment, you can do application assessment at a similar level and identify the amount of wasted power. We are seeing savings in the region of 30 percent for power and air conditioning requirements and 160 U rack space savings per 50 to 100 servers.
These solutions are being paid for out of air conditioning budgets alone.

There is no definitive, single answer to the power problem, but there are options available. Aegis IT has many customers with the business issues outlined here. If you want talk to us please contact Paul O’Donnell at paul.odonnell@aegisit.co.uk or call 07920 091428

By: Martin Samuels

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