12 Steps to Greener Data Center

8/3/2019 12 Steps to Greener Data Center

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Checklist

12 Steps to a GreenerDatacenterYou can improve your organizations operating eciency and lowercosts by adopting environmentally-riendly technologies

When it comes to modernizing your data center, whats good or the earth is also good or your business. Phasing

in an environmentally-riendly data center can both lower your organizations carbon ootprint and reduce your

operating costs. An enterprise with a large datacenter can save hundreds o thousands o dollars a year in

energy bills by adopting sustainable and ecient IT technologies that minimize your environmental impact. This

12-part checklist can help you start the green IT transormation:

1. Review your organizations IT inrastructure and inventory

The rst step in any project where you propose to save costs, eliminate waste, optimize perormance, and

increase eciency is to know precisely what you already have. A clear inventory helps you understand what new

equipment is necessary to purchase and what old equipment should be discarded. It also sets a baseline so that

you can understand rom what position you are making changes. This will help in perormance, monitoring and

determining the real ROI o the project.

This needs to be a two-part review. First, take a careul inventory o every server and its usage patterns, load, and

power consumption in your data center. Second, make a similar list or all o the clients, switches, routers, and

other power-consuming devices on your network. Include everything plugged in rom wireless access points to

storage devices to IP telephony and surveillance equipment to printers.

2. Review your physical acility and operations

Your IT operations are intimately connected to their physical environment. This means that a thorough evaluation

o your current datacenter and uture needs must include a acilities review. Can you consolidate multiple

datacenters, or example? Or, can you disperse large power-sucking datacenters and create smaller, more nimble

centers closer to the principal users?

You also need to evaluate the power supply and heating and cooling systems. The supply needs to be right-

sized to avoid brownouts, and heating and cooling are intimately connected to the operational health o your IT

equipment.

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These last points lead to the need or an operations review. Does your IT operations team coordinate andcooperate with your physical plant operations team and vice versa? I IT anticipates a surge in server trac

and usage maybe even a rapid deployment and provisioning o new servers will they contact the physical

operations team and make sure wiring, power and cooling requirements can be met?

3. Analyze IT operations need

With a thorough understanding o your existing enterprise equipment, you are ready to evaluate what new

network equipment you need. You should create a purchase plan or the next year, orecast usage or three

years, and even consider your organizations needs ve years down the road. This lets you avoid costly mistakes

in ailing to allow enough headroom or growth, which could lead you to have to rip out and replace equipment in

as little as three years.

To make an accurate orecast, you need to survey business and IT stakeholders and ask them to project their

IT needs a year, three years, and ve years into the uture. Your new, more ecient datacenter must be able to

meet the needs o the business a year rom now as well as the projected changes in three years.

Dont orget to look at usage patterns, time-based usage, and peaks and lows. Even i you expect to make

substantial savings by consolidating servers into ewer datacenters, you have to allow or enough bandwidth,

processing power, and storage to handle peak network trac.

Step 4: Analyze acility and physical operation needs

You need to make sure that the physical plant will operate eectively in lock step with your IT equipment, duringboth peak and low usage times. That means looking at locations, wiring, physical conguration, power supply, and

heating and cooling systems. Make sure that you do not under or over provision any part o your operation.

5. Prioritize and optimize usage patterns

The next step is to optimize your operations. You need a clear understanding o which IT operations and business

operations are mission-critical and have top priority. You also need to know how the dierent parts o your

network are used to successully handle these business applications, including their usage patterns. For instance,

do certain business-critical applications run every night? Does trac peak at a certain time every month?

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Once you have a clear understanding o the expected operations and applications, their usage patterns andtheir priority, you can optimize your IT practices to deliver them eectively. Ideally, you will have as much o

your network working optimally all the time as possible. In reality, you will need to be able to guarantee good

perormance or the peak utilization o IT resources without leaving too much o your equipment running idle

during the lows.

6. Consolidate: Eliminate redundancies and unused equipment

Now, the real value o all the preceding work comes into play. Every single area where you can consolidate,

eliminate duplication, remove redundancy, and fat out get rid o unused equipment becomes an area where you

make concrete bottom-line savings to your operations.

In organizations where employees have added to networks without supervision or where there have been largechanges in organizational structure and operations, the savings at this stage can be substantial. Do not orget

to document clearly the changes and to count power savings in your ROI as well as any capital equipment and

ongoing operational cost savings.

7. Deploy virtualization technologies

At this point in the project you can start to take deploy server and storage virtualization technologies.

Virtualization is a powerul tool that can eliminate redundancies as well as unused bandwidth, storage, and

processing cycles by allowing one set o physical equipment to handle multiple workloads. This is particularly

valuable in an environment where usage levels move up and down continually.

8. Apply time- and usage-based provisioning

Modern servers can handle power cycling easily, and in hundreds o thousands o power cycles not one ailure

occurred during testing. This means that the ecient datacenter will use a WakeOnLAN-type technology or

coping with peak usage. It also makes or considerable power savings. In addition, a WakeOnLAN technology

combined with a smart provisioning manager and good virtualization means that the network can quickly adapt

and adjust to rapidly changing loads.

These technologies illustrate why it is so important that a thorough priority usage analysis over time is made

or the datacenter. I that is done correctly, then this stage o the process can yield as many savings as the

consolidation stage.

9. Upgrade to energy efcient network equipment

Implementing a project with as much scope as a green datacenter, you cannot avoid equipment upgrades. It

is even possible that i no such analysis has been done or several years, a complete rip and replace may be

necessary. First, be sure to do a ull audit and ROI analysis to make sure that a gradual change might not be a

better plan.

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About Zi Davis

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Datacenter, network and server technologies improve constantly. Some o the technologies you may wishto upgrade include blade servers, virtualization, dynamic provisioning, smart power monitoring, speedstep

technologies that speed up and slow down processors to match demand and lower power use, WakeOnLAN, and

others. Most modern network equipment is now designed to be energy ecient.

10. Working practices

This may be the single most important change introduced as part o the process. It is common or physical plant

and IT departments to start out separately and then gure out ways to work together. However, or the modern

datacenter you need to ormalize the working relationship in some way. In addition, an operations group needs

to also liaise with the regular business operations to make sure that communication is clear and swit about all

orms o change rom outages to upgrades to communicating sudden business operation changes that could

require signicant datacenter support.

11. Monitor, monitor, monitor

As you phase in greener equipment, the evolving datacenter should be monitored extensively. Monitoring and

reporting allow you to accurately measure the eectiveness o the changes youve implemented. They also allow

operations to do a signicantly better job at running the new datacenter, which can in turn save considerable

amounts in power consumption terms.

12. Recycle outdated equipment

This last item is an oten neglected part o moving to a green datacenter and even more oten neglected arethe cost advantages o doing this the right way. I old equipment still has some lie let in it, you might be able

to resell it or donate it and get a tax write-o. I its worthless, avoid sending it to the landll by nding a local

e-cycling acility or event. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency can direct you to nearby resources.

For any other inormation and advice you can always visit itmanagement.com or call one o our

analysts on 1-877-864-7275.


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12 Steps to Greener Data Center