73% of Australian businesses, no plans to green IT: research

Stan Beer
Tuesday, 11 November 2008 15:00

Science - Energy

A survey of more than 180 top Australian companies conducted in May 2008 found that 73% of companies had not presented a business case that incorporated any Green IT factors.

The survey was recently commissioned by Macquarie Telecom to assess which of Australia’s medium and large businesses had plans to green their data centre.

While on the surface, the survey turned up a bleak result, there was some positive news. The survey found that 53% of the businesses planned to green their data centres in the next year.

Of those businesses with plans to ‘green,’ the greatest hurdles were: a lack of understanding and an absence of independent data on which IT vendors and technologies have what impact on energy consumption.

“We learned a lot through trial and error in the early days as there were no Australian precedents for large, local data centres.  Now, however, we have a clear strategy with realistic milestones to measure our progress,” Aidan Tudehope, Managing Director, Hosting, Macquarie Telecom said.

After six months of measurement and planning, Macquarie Telecom commenced its full green IT strategy implementation program in January 2008 with a strong focus on designing for virtualisation and utilising a mix of energy efficient dual core and quad core servers, for customer managed environments.

“Using virtualisation, we were able to increase the levels of performance, redundancy and scalability for our customers whilst reducing the number of actual physical servers each customer requires,” Tudehope said.

“We provide a separate virtual platform dedicated to each customer to ensure guaranteed uptime, performance, security, as well as the ability to deal with peak loads.

“There has been a big shift to virtualisation among our Australian business customers, largely as a way to boost redundancy and performance, without the cost associated with building a second set of infrastructure. The triggers for this shift have been the need to improve service levels for mission critical applications, accommodate business growth and reduce incremental operating costs.”

Managed virtual dedicated server implementations now account for more than 30% of total managed server implementations in the Macquarie Hosting data centre.

Virtualisation was used not just on servers, but also across networking and storage technologies.

“Where virtualisation does make sense in a shared customer environment is for storage.  For example, a company doesn’t need to buy a massive SAN outright if they run a large, transactional Web site that only uses a small amount of storage. Conversely, large customers that need 20 terabytes of storage and are growing rapidly require massive scalability. Some businesses need slow archival access and others require high speed real-time access.

“With storage virtualisation, we can offer customers a pay as you use/grow solution based on their needs that is specific to industry, volume and speed of access.  A pay as you use/grow model is much more cost effective for customers than purchasing a SAN outright,” Tudehope said.

Other key learnings from the six month data centre greening initiative include:

    * First – put in place measurement equipment to establish benchmarks
    * Start by making small changes first as they can have a significant impact e.g.
          o Ensure you are only cooling components of the data centre that need to be cooled, e.g. racks and servers, not hallways
          o Replace poorly sealed tiles to ensure cooled air is not escaping
          o Don’t over-cool the data centre environment, most IT equipment can operate effectively at 20 degrees Celsius, it doesn’t need to be cooled below this
    * Utilise management tools to map which users or technologies are drawing the most power – in some areas, 80% of power consumption in the data centre came from 20% of users. Storage accounted for 30-40% of power consumption
    * Virtualise as much as you can (servers, storage, networking, firewalls etc) but be careful when virtualising CPUs if uptime is important. The objective should be to add value to your infrastructure
    * Evaluating server and other equipment based purely on acquisition cost is a false economy – over the lifetime of a server, the costs of powering an inefficient system can be four times that of the initial acquisition cost