The Tech Side of Server Monitoring & Capacity Planning

My colleague and our fearless CTO Alex Bewley recently wrote about the impact of technology on our environment in his piece titled Reductionist Mindset. There was also an article recently in the New York Times Bits Blog Data Centers Are Becoming Big Polluters, Study Finds discussing how by the year 2020 it is expected that data centers will contribute more greenhouse emissions than the airline industry.

The following quote from the NYT article sums up how until now we have been looking at efficiency within the data center.

For example, computer servers are used at only 6 percent of their capacity on average, while data center facilities as a whole are used at 56 percent of peak performance. In other words, if data centers were hotels, they would be bankrupt and shut down instead of growing like kudzu.

So it is not all doom and gloom. If we can increase the utilization of our infrastructure even nominally, the reduced impact we can as data center operators have on the environment can be significant. Through virtualization (VMware, LDOMs, LPARs, etc) we are now starting to see utilization/efficiency rise on servers to levels that the mainframe days enjoyed.

As the management tools for virtual infrastructure mature, I think that we're going to see more and more capabilities built in around managing data center power and cooling as part of the overall virtualization strategy. Distributed power management and localized cooling, rather than cooling the entire data center. Also as power density rises, centralized cooling will become an increasingly difficult proposition to implement.

Labels: Virtualization Power Environment