Power and cooling savings w/ VMware Infrastructure

Posted by Bogomil Balkansky
Director of Product Marketing

The datacenter has typically been a quiet, and face it, boring, place: rows upon rows of identical computers and the droning sound of air conditioning – not exactly the place where journalists look for spectacular drama. And you want to keep it that way – if things are working as they should, no one needs to know what is going on in the datacenter, or that such a place even exists.

So why has the datacenter come out of its anonymity, and is suddenly filling the pages of the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal? And why are huge billboards on highways and airports touting the concern about computer energy consumption and cost? The truth is that rising energy prices have hit the datacenter as hard as they have hit Detroit. Modern servers have increasingly become the computing equivalent of gas-guzzling SUVs. While a typical server 10 years ago consumed 100W of power, the average server today consumes . Servers would use about 30% of their peak electricity consumption while sitting idle, which is often more than 80% of the time. Imagine your SUV going through gallon after gallon of gas while sitting in the garage. And to make things even worse, the at the same time – . The overall power density of the datacenter is increasing by . All the electricity consumed by servers is transformed into heat – so to prevent data centers from turning into hot houses, about is consumed by the cooling equipment.

IDC calculates that the total power and cooling bill for servers in the US stands at a whopping $14 billion a year, and if the current trends persist, the bill is going to rise to $50 billion by the end of the decade. The growth of datacenter energy spending far outpaces the rate at which IT budgets grow, dangerously crowding out other vital IT initiatives and projects.

Not that virtualization is a panacea for every IT woe, but it can definitely help overturn that dire forecast. One of the mainstay use cases of virtualization – server consolidation and containment – allows customers to “squeeze” multiple workloads on the same server. There is a flow through effect from needing fewer physical servers – it means that VMware customers need less space in the datacenter, and less electricity and cooling. We estimate conservatively that for every workload moved from a physical to virtual environment, customers can save about $290 in electricity costs, and about $360 a year in cooling costs. The more important thing is that these savings accrue year after year. For example, VMware customer Provident Bank reports cutting power consumption by 13,000 watts.

Beside the company bottom line effect, there is something to be said about the environmental impact of virtualization. The $650 per virtualized workload represents 8,000 kWh of electricity saved. With more than 1 million workloads running in VMware virtual machines, the aggregate power savings are about 8 billion kWh, which is more than the heating, ventilation, and cooling in a year. With results like that, your datacenter won’t mind some attention from the press.