Virtualization, not bad but could be better - By Paula Bernier

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• Paula Bernier

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   In most non-virtualized enterprise data center environments, servers are under-utilized, with most of them operating at 5 to 15 percent of their capacity, Rahul Singh, principal at Pace Harmon, a third-party outsourcing advisory and technology consulting firm, tells me.

    “This is, in large part, due to applications having dedicated server and storage hardware, thus requiring more power, cooling, network and real estate,” he says.

    With virtualization, however, server utilization can be improved to be as high as 85 percent, he says, resulting in 50 to 70 percent energy consumption and carbon footprint decreases.

    That’s great, but it could be even greater.

    Alan Murphy, technical marketing manager at F5 Networks, says every virtualization vendor is using the green marketing. But he adds that there’s not a lot of tangible product to optimize green deployments.

    “What I mean by that is VMware has got a lot of products that solely focus on power management, and what they can do is they can detect when a virtual machine is not being used … and they can power down that virtual machine so it uses less power resources,” he says. “On the surface that’s great; it sounds like that’s exactly what people want to do. But what we’re seeing from our customers [is] there’s still a good bit of resistance to allow an automated system to turn up and turn down complete servers. If one of those malfunctions, then you could lose an entire Web farm.”

    

   Murphy says tools are available to address that concern, but, as a rule, customers don’t yet have the comfort level required to implement such power management solutions, at least not for production and mission-critical applications.

    

   But, he adds, customers are likely to develop trust for such solutions over time, just as they have with virtualization itself.

    

   And once customers are intelligently controlling and shifting processing power to make the best use of server resources and energy consumption, says Shehzad Merchant, senior director of data center strategy at Extreme Networks Inc., they might consider doing the same with their other data center gear, like switches. 

   
   

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