Reducing Data Center Costs during Recession

The world's economies are facing a slowdown or recession. Data center's budget is likely to face a cut. One of the most important data center costs is electricity — for powering both the computing equipment and the systems used to provide cooling. Since Virtualization reduces the number of physical boxes needed to power and cool, it can play a key role in minimizing overall electricity consumption.

Virtualization also reduces costs by minimizing the amount of hardware that must be replaced. Thanks to the operation of fewer servers, you then have fewer to replace when they reach the end of their lives.

The phenomenal growth of the scope and power of data centers for enterprises has significantly increased its energy consumption. IT teams are monitoring server and storage utilization and must consider ways to raise utilization levels so that IT hardware does not sit idle while consuming power and driving up ventilation and cooling costs.

Seven Steps for reducing Data Center Costs
As the world economy is in doldrums, it is time for enterprises to cut data centre costs. According to a report prepared by the industry research firm Gartner, rationalizing hardware, consolidating facilities and better managing energy costs are some of the ways IT administrators can reduce their data center costs. All the seven suggestions put forth by the research firm are commonsense steps. However, thanks to the global recession, the steps assume special significance as IT managers are finding it difficult to find ways to do more while trimming expenses.

By taking the necessary steps, enterprises can have significant savings in their data centers. For example, removing a single x86 server can save more than $400 a year in energy costs alone. The recommendations are part of a study conducted by Gartner titled "How to Cut Your Data Center Costs" that the research firm announced in this month.

Rationalize the Hardware
Server rationalization projects can save from 5 to 10 per cent of overall hardware costs, according to Gartner. Businesses get a good idea of what servers they have and how they are being used, and can often reduce maintenance and support charges. In addition, server rationalization can reduce energy costs. For example, a company can save more than $400 per server per year in energy costs.

Consolidate the Data Centers
This includes everything – from the largest, most complex data centers to the smallest systems room. Consolidation projects can save from 5 to 15 per cent of the overall data center budget, Gartner says. The savings come not only in real estate, but also in the cutting of redundant IT assets and reducing software, maintenance and support, and disaster recovery contracts. In addition, consolidation projects can lead to the need for smaller IT staffs, but Gartner recommends retraining these employees rather than dispensing with their services.

Manage Energy and Facilities Costs
The increasing use of such products as blade servers and the rising density in data centers are contributing to higher energy bills. Gartner recommends raising the temperature of data centers to 75 degrees to lower cooling demands, using outside air rather than expensive air conditioners, using hot aisle-cold aisle configurations, blanking panels and economizers to drive down power consumption, and taking advantage of hardware-based energy management software offered by system makers.

Renegotiate Contracts
In difficult economic times, vendors are used to reviewing contracts, Gartner says. So, data center managers, along with finance and procurement teams, should review all hardware, lease, software, maintenance and support contracts to see what can be cut or renegotiated for better deals.

Manage the Cost of People
People do not come cheap and can account for as much as 40 per cent of the overall data center costs, according to Gartner. So, businesses should take a hard look at what they have in their staffs and what they will need over the next two years—and consider finding skilled workers in places such as India, Brazil, Poland and Romania, which offer cheaper labour.

Sweat the Assets
Businesses that delay buying new systems risk performance disadvantages and possibly higher energy costs. However, particularly in difficult economic times, those might be worth the trade-off to avoid having to deal with the capital expense of buying new assets, Gartner says. Businesses will want to negotiate maintenance and support costs, and ensure that software will continue to be supported on older hardware that is still in use.

Use Virtualization Technology
The cost savings gained by using server and storage virtualization are impressive. Though virtualization projects often mean licence and project costs, within two years businesses can see reduced server energy consumption by as much as 82 per cent and floor space savings of up to 86 per cent. Virtualization improves operational efficiency, supports consolidation projects, and can help with hardware decommissioning and cost management initiatives. The results can be: less hardware, lower operating depreciation costs, less expensive maintenance and support, and smaller energy bills.

Server virtualization enables sharing of IT resources and consolidation of servers, storage and entire data centers. A virtual machine, or a virtual server, is software that simulates the operations of computer hardware, enabling an application to run on the virtual machine just as it would on a physical computer. The advantage of this approach is that many virtual machines can run on a single physical computer, thus enabling the consolidation of many small servers onto one larger server. This approach helps establish a standardized computing environment on which to run applications, middleware servers, database servers and storage servers.
 

Oracle
Oracle Advanced Compression—with Oracle Database 11g Enterprise Edition—helps manage growing amounts of data (that on average are tripling every couple of years) in a cost-effective manner. It compresses any type of data, including structured and unstructured data such as documents, images, and multimedia, as well as network traffic and data in the process of being backed up. As a result, Oracle Advanced Compression helps companies use resources more efficiently and lower storage costs.

As seen in the Wall Street Journal and other major publications, Oracle is proud of the energy and space savings that Oracle Advanced Compression delivers. It helps Oracle Database 11g use much less the disk space and power, while it runs faster than ever before. With Oracle Advanced Data Compression, Oracle customers are making the planet a little greener.

In addition, Oracle offers a grid computing architecture, which provides for an efficient data center for enterprises. The Oracle Grid computing architecture features many powerful techniques that improve energy efficiency and data center productivity. Grid computing enables groups of networked computers to be pooled and provisioned on demand to meet the changing needs of business. Instead of dedicated servers and storage for each application, grid computing enables multiple applications to share computing infrastructure, resulting in much greater flexibility, cost, power efficiency, performance, scalability and availability, all at the same time.

Oracle RAC supports the deployment of a single database across a cluster of servers—providing unbeatable fault tolerance, performance and scalability with no application changes necessary. Oracle’s server virtualization product, Oracle VM, provides a highly efficient way to run multiple Oracle and non-Oracle databases, middleware and application environments in a single server. Oracle VM enables IT to quickly add or release more server resources for spikes or lulls in demand, increasing utilization and reducing energy costs.

HCL
As per HCL, data centers are the heart and soul of business operations and organizations are facing increasing challenges to manage complexity and cost of running data centers. HCL helps its clients to transform services, providing dramatic improvement in the reliability, flexibility and cost-effectiveness of enterprise IT infrastructure through a massive reduction in data center complexity. HCL’s Data Center Solution works on three key parameters that include Management, Technology and Facility. The activities undertaken to reduce costs for clients include Tools & ITIL practices that help in automation, thus reducing the manpower costs, Information Lifecycle Management, Energy Efficiency Metrics as a part of the Management bucket. Virtualization (HCL’s Server Virtualization services promises 30% cost savings on total enterprise IT operations cost), Power management, Asset Consolidation, and Asset upgrade/Rebuild are done for the clients under the Technology bucket. Under the Facility bucket, steps like Facility consolidation, Upgrade/Rebuild, Rack Optimization, Hot/Cold Aisle set-up are optimized for the enterprises. Because of HCL Virtualization Services, a leading Life sciences Company saved $1500,000/year in power alone through 80% reduction in Server hardware, 82% reduction in power consumption, 92% reduction in server provisioning cost, 87% reduction in Data center Server Space, 23% reduction in server administration cost, and 75% reduction in server downtime cost. The estimated total power savings globally amounted to $1,500K/year for the company.