Gaining Power Efficiency using Server Consolidation & Virtualisation

The implication of running separate physical servers for each of your major applications not only poses a problem with physical space requirements, but also impacts on the energy demands and costs to your business.

To put this in context:

• Gartner Group says that energy costs may increase from 10% of the IT budget today to over 50% in the next few years.
  
• Servers use about 30% of their peak electricity consumption while sitting idle.
  
• Heat created by servers requires another 125% more electricity for cooling.
  
• IDC says that the cost to power servers will exceed the cost of servers by next year.
  
• Data centre energy spending growth far outpaces the rate at which IT budgets grow.
  
• The majority of servers only utilise between 5% and 15% of their performance potential.

The cost savings for power and space that have resulted from server consolidation and virtualisation often represent an additional ROI - not always included in the initial justification for investing in virtualisation technologies.

By moving to a virtual infrastructure, organisations can run multiple applications on a single physical server, significantly reducing their physical space requirements and energy costs.

With power requirements rising ten-fold in just a few years, a single high-density server rack may draw up to 30,000 watts of power. Even at maximum power supply efficiency, this equates to 3kW of wasted energy per rack. This creates an enormous demand on climate control systems to remove this heat, and generates a high level of associated energy costs. In addition many data centres have now reached the limit of permissible power that can be drawn from the grid.

Virtualisation can raise resource utilisation to 70%, realising far more efficient performance potential and lowering requirements for power, space and cooling.