Research Shows 73% of Australian businesses have not presented
a business case for Green IT but 53% plan to in FY09
Sydney – 10 November 2008 – Macquarie Hosting, a division
of Macquarie Telecom, today released preliminary data on the results
of its Green IT Strategy designed to improve efficiency and reduce
energy consumption in its
data centre.
Six months into the program the results, independently reviewed
by The Frame Group’s data centre team, showed that despite a 30
per cent increase in the number of customer managed servers implemented,
Macquarie Hosting had reduced the overall amount of energy consumption
in its data centre by more than 10 per cent.
This equates to more than 600 tonnes of CO2 emissions according
to The Frame Group calculations.
The Macquarie Hosting
Green IT Strategy focuses on achieving
the ideal combination of energy efficiencies across the multiple
platforms used to support customers’ mission critical applications.
In particular, it focuses on utilising energy-efficient servers
and networking equipment (e.g. switches, routers, firewalls), storage
and solutions designed for
managed virtualisation as well as implementation
of redesigned best practice data centre infrastructure (e.g. air-flow
efficient racks and cooling).
“Macquarie Telecom’s data centre accounted for around 90 per
cent of our company power bill,” said Aidan Tudehope, Managing Director,
Hosting, Macquarie Telecom.
“Our analysis showed that a large corporate data centre can consume
as much as forty times the energy of a typical Australian office
housing 100 staff.
“Medium to large businesses looking to reduce their carbon footprint
can make a significant impact by starting in the data centre, rather
than just switching off lights at the end of each day,” he said.
Macquarie Telecom achieved the energy and associated cost reductions
through a structured approach to monitoring, measuring and subsequently
standardising the appropriate technologies to maximise power and
cooling efficiency within the data centre.
This approach has seen the
data centre cooling power load reduced
by 26 per cent from this time six months ago.
It also identified that in some areas, 80 per cent of power consumption
in the data centre came from 20 per cent of users while storage
accounted for as much as 30-40 per cent of power consumption.
Independent Research: 73% of businesses, no plans to green IT
To learn more about Green IT, Macquarie Telecom recently commissioned
research to assess which of Australia’s medium and large businesses
had plans to green their datacentre. The independent survey of more
than 180 top Australian companies conducted in May 2008 found that
73 per cent of companies had not presented a business case that
incorporated any Green IT factors, but 53 per cent planned to do
so in the next year.
Of those businesses with plans to ‘green,’ the greatest hurdles
were: a lack of understanding and an absence of independent data
on which IT vendors and technologies have what impact on energy
consumption.
Macquarie Telecom learnings: from server choice to virtualisation
“We learned a lot through trial and error in the early days as
there were no Australian precedents for large, local data centres.
Now, however, we have a clear strategy with realistic milestones
to measure our progress,” Tudehope said.
Macquarie Telecom commenced its program in January 2008 with
a strong focus on designing for virtualisation and utilising a mix
of energy efficient Sun Microsystems dual core and quad core servers,
Sun Fire X4150, 4200, 4450, 4600 systems for customer managed environments.
“Using virtualisation, we were able to increase the levels of
performance, redundancy and scalability for our customers whilst
reducing the number of actual physical servers each customer requires,”
Tudehope said.
“We provide a separate virtual platform dedicated to each customer
to ensure guaranteed uptime, performance, security, as well as the
ability to deal with peak loads.
“There has been a big shift to virtualisation among our Australian
business customers, largely as a way to boost redundancy and performance,
without the cost associated with building a second set of infrastructure.
The triggers for this shift have been the need to improve service
levels for mission critical applications, accommodate business growth
and reduce incremental operating costs.”
Managed virtual dedicated server implementations now account
for more than 30 per cent of total managed server implementations
in the Macquarie Hosting data centre.
Virtualisation was used not just on servers, but also across
networking and storage technologies.
“Where virtualisation does make sense in a shared customer environment
is for storage. For example, a company doesn’t need to buy a massive
SAN outright if they run a large, transactional Web site that only
uses a small amount of storage. Conversely, large customers that
need 20 terabytes of storage and are growing rapidly require massive
scalability. Some businesses need slow archival access and others
require high speed real-time access.
“With storage virtualisation, we can offer customers a pay as
you use/grow solution based on their needs that is specific to industry,
volume and speed of access. A pay as you use/grow model is much
more cost effective for customers than purchasing a SAN outright,”
Tudehope said.
Other key learnings from the six month data centre greening initiative
include:
- First – put in place measurement equipment to establish benchmarks
- Start by making small changes first as they can have a significant
impact e.g.
- Ensure you are only cooling components of the data centre that
need to be cooled, e.g. racks and servers, not hallways
- Replace poorly sealed tiles to ensure cooled air is not escaping
- Don’t over-cool the data centre environment, most IT equipment
can operate effectively at 20 degrees Celsius, it doesn’t need to
be cooled below this
- Utilise management tools to map which users or technologies are
drawing the most power – in some areas, 80 per cent of power consumption
in the data centre came from 20 per cent of users. Storage accounted
for 30-40 per cent of power consumption
- Virtualise as much as you can (servers, storage, networking,
firewalls etc) but be careful when virtualising CPUs if uptime is
important. The objective should be to add value to your infrastructure
- Evaluating
server and other equipment based purely on acquisition cost is a
false economy – over the lifetime of a server, the costs of powering
an inefficient system can be four times that of the initial acquisition
cost
Contact Macquarie Hosting for more information on
managing a green data
centre.
| 
