“Going Green” can apply to nearly every area of today’s society. One way to “Go Green” is by reducing our carbon footprint by reducing overall power consumption. There are also many other ways in which we, as individuals, can assist in the effort to “go green.”  

In the CCSU data center, we are actively engaged in becoming “greener” through the virtualization of our physical servers and the use of Storage Area Network (SAN) technology. This will greatly reduce the amount of power consumed and also decrease the cooling costs associated with the data center. Power and cooling costs account for a significant percentage of the total operating cost of any data center and any reduction in that area has a substantial savings in the overall total cost of ownership (TCO) for those resources as well as decreasing the carbon footprint on the environment. With data storage growing almost exponentially, SAN technology, which can be thought of as a giant hard disk sitting directly on the network, allows for efficient use of drive space without adding additional server storage. It can be “carved up” and reapportioned as needed.

After the era of giant mainframe computers that did everything, data centers started utilizing much

smaller servers for more specialized purposes. Programmers for specialized software got into the habit of writing their software to be the only application on that server, due to the need for all of its computing power. Software vendors often would not support their product if it was being “shared” with another application. This meant that for every new specialized application that was being deployed, there was a new server that also needed to be installed and maintained, leading to server sprawl and associated power and cooling problems.

Around 2001, server hardware began to significantly outperform the operating system and the hosted applications. In other words, the server hardware would only be working at approximately 10% of its potential, yet the server was consuming power and the associated cooling 100% of the time, even in the middle of December! Unfortunately, the specialized application vendors still haven’t embraced the fact that the hardware can easily handle multiple products and often still won’t support the sharing of physical resources.

By utilizing virtualization and SAN technologies, we have been able to conform to the one-server, one- application rule that application vendors insist upon, while still being more efficient with our physical resources.  Currently, CCSU is running 90 virtual servers on 8 physical servers, thereby significantly reducing the overall physical space, cooling costs and power consumption in the server room—and we aren’t done yet.

As our physical servers need replacing, we are being very aggressive with our virtualization efforts. Instead of purchasing another server, we create a virtual server to replace it whenever possible. By utilizing a SAN rather than individual file servers, we are more efficiently allocating disk storage to a device optimized for it, rather than having a series of servers with a lot of wasted space.