Virtualisation: A Green World Order

June 5, 2007: In line with World Environment Day, VMware has talked up their roll in not only saving dollar, but also reducing the C02 emissions’ of IT organisations, reiterating to IDM their virtualised server consolidation rate of twelve servers to one.

x As pressures are mounting on CIOs and IT managers to get a hold of their escalating power bills and sprawling data centres, virtualisation technologies are providing a well-needed respite from growing budgets and public condemnation over exceeding energy usage.

Paul Harapin, managing director of VMware in Australia points out it’s virtualisation technologies providing the perfect opportunity for organisations to take hold of their growing carbon emissions, yet still maintain the power and force of their IT infrastructures.

“More CEOs are coming out and giving statements about having their organisations go ‘carbon neutral.’ It was only a couple of weeks ago that Rupert Murdoch made the commitment to achieve this by 2010,” says Harapin. “Given that it’s IT that’s driving 60 percent or more of a company’s power utilisation, where do you think they’re going to look first?”

For most CEOs, they’re probably going to head straight for the data centre and see air-conditioning running at full capacity while a load of servers each work on a small part of the job. “Most servers run on an average of 5-10 percent,” says Harapin. “Then there are all those competing servers in other data centres not being used.”

This is where virtualisation comes into the picture and a big part of why VMware’s x86 virtualisation technology has been declared the 7th most influential technology of the last 25 years by eWEEK Labs. While various technologies are currently evolving to reduce energy consumption in the data centre, VMware says the most logical solution is to match computing capacity with computing demand, consolidate workloads and power off underutilised hardware through virtualisation.

“The consolidation is one aspect, and then there’s the fact you can buy less hardware and get resource pooling – we enable organisations to pool their resources and pool their capacity.”

When describing the waste that runs off the back of parts of a data centre not being used, Harapin likes to use analogies - his favourite? “It’s like flying a jumbo jet with business class at full capacity, but economy running empty.”

For an organisation that only started up in 1998, the VMware story is far from uneventful. Snapped up by EMC in later 2003, some analysts now suggest EMC is dealing with a child that’s growing faster then itself. VMware hit quarter one sales revenues of $285 million this year, 95 percent up on the corresponding quarter in 2006.

As the most widely deployed virtualisation solution, transforming a mix of industry standard x86 servers alongside their networking, memory, disk and existing processors, why is VMware so far in front of the pack? “When customers call, I never hear about technical problems. They might say ‘your sales rep is asking too much!’ but never a technical problem,” says Harapin. “From our perspective, this is the most non-disruptive, disruptive technology there is.

Harapin says the cost-savings by way of power, water and space utilisation are often immediate for organisations when they switch to a virtualised platform. “All the sudden the IT guy is becoming a hero because he managed to keep the organisation’s budget down,” he says.

There is also the issue of processing capacity. Harapin points out that multi-core processors could well be running on empty if it were not for the virtualisation solutions that support them in a data centre. Given the physical infrastructure of a data centre grows at a slower pace than technological advances, it’s virtualisation that can enable data centres to keep pace with innovation.

In the United States alone, IDC says in 2006 the annual power and cooling expenditure for servers was around $14 billion, a figure that is expected to blow out to $50 billion in 2010. While Australian businesses are paying cheaper power bills then their average US counterparts, the US experience may well pave the way for what our local organisations can expect in the future.

Comment on this story.