Contents |
Executive summary
The corporate IT group of a very large, worldwide financial organization with 100,000 employees, has initiated an ongoing “greening” process. This is focused largely on reducing energy use both to decrease the corporation's carbon footprint while creating a net savings in operational costs over the lifetime of new, more energy-efficient equipment, including new storage systems. This effort is not viewed by the IT administration as a one-time project but rather as a perpetual process of evaluating new technology in part on its energy efficiency and introducing it into the corporate data centers to replace aging systems as appropriate. For instance, while the initial effort in the storage area included replacing aging systems with more efficient disk drives, the administration is already watching the development of solid state storage carefully with the intention of introducing this more energy-efficient and durable technology when it becomes practical. The program also reaches beyond the data centers to introduce new units laptops chosen in part for energy efficiency into the normal end-user laptop replacement cycle. It is here that the IT administration anticipates introducing solid state storage initially, as its price decreases.
IT is under pressure to cut its budget in 2008, and clearly cutting the cost of energy is an important part of the program. The difference is that today the focus of the cost cutting is clearly on energy use and other areas that are also environmental issues. And the organization as a whole is also willing to make changes that provide a positive impact on the environment even when they may not save significant money. For instance, desktop printers are being eliminated from its offices in favor of large shared printers, and IT is conducting a marketing campaign to convince users to print documents only when a paper copy is absolutely necessary. Corporate cafeterias have eliminated paper trays, which add to trash and litter, in favor of reusable plastic trays, even though they require more handling and washing between uses.
Original system snapshot
- Total IT budget $6 billion, under pressure from senior management seeking to cut it by $1B in 2008.
- Corporate technology budget $400 million
- Total IT staff 10,000, of which corporate IT has 800.
- Key applications include PeopleSoft, SAP, global data financial warehouses, investment banking trading systems, full range of financial services applications, all in-house.
- 1 million sq. ft. of active data center raised floor space.
- 29,000 racks.
- Conducting a strategic data center migration to close small centers (15,000 sq. ft. and smaller).
- 3 petabytes of total storage and growing in part because the company is moving all archived storage off tape for security reasons.
- Multi-tiered storage architecture with tier 1 (mostly financial trading data) on Symmetrix with SRDF and full real-time mirroring, tier 2 on Clarion or Solara boxes, tier 3 on NAS.
Pain points
- A $30+ million annual corporate storage power bill.
- Upper management believing that there is a 'sliver bullet' with power reduction and demanding a 25-30% reduction in the bill.
- EMC boxes mixed devices used for different storage tiers in a single cabinet, preventing the organization from realizing power savings on lower tier devices.
- Tier 3 storage contains a mixture of devices purchased mainly on the basis of price that are not necessarily energy efficient.
Business case for green
- ”Think green, save green.” The business case was based on bottom-line savings mostly in the reduced use of increasingly costly power, in response to the Board of Director's target of cutting the IT budget by $1B in 2008.
- The storage group target is a 30% reduction in its power consumption.
- Some data centers running short of power. Thus the investments in more efficient technologies and methods can put off the major expense of building new facilities.
- Hot spots have been created in data centers by the move to rack-mounted drives. Power and heat reduction measures can save the expense of rebuilding cooling systems with extra capacity to handle the heat problem.
- The corporation joined a green IT council with Microsoft and Google among other industry leaders. The work from that council is communicated to operating IT groups through a series of steering committees for specific technical areas – networking, storage, etc. -- containing senior engineers and subject matter experts. These committees are looking at advanced strategies such as converting data centers to DC to save energy.
- As these are translated into specific technologies, the IT team behind each upgrade needs to equate the decreased energy demand into kilowatt hours, decreases in cooling pounds, etc., to estimate the expected operational savings.
- The organization is also building a new headquarters building at the World Trade Center site that will be 100% green, and IT needs to fit into that initiative with a full suite of green IT technology possibly including virtual desktops.
Solutions considered
- Energy Star compliant laptops for users that use solid state storage and advanced features such as automatic shut-downs to save energy.
- Conducted a data center carbon footprint study.
Solution strategy
- Replace old storage boxes with newer, more efficient drives.
- Convert to DC power.
- Migrate the mainframe environment to new, more efficient CMOS technology that does not require water cooling.
- Physically separate different tier devices into different boxes to allow power savings.
- Define and measure the operational requirements for each tier: What is the demand, how fast a response time is needed, is 24X7 access required or can the boxes in that tier be powered down for part of the 24-hour cycle, what level of backup is required?
- Migrate tier 3 storage to new EMC DMX 950 boxes that use less power, have a smaller footprint and less head dissipation.
- Replace remaining CRT screens with flat screens.
- Power down all disks containing data more than one year old in long-term archive bunkers.
- Eliminate all desk-side personal printers throughout the organization in favor of larger multifunction printers in central locations on building floors.
- Institute server virtualization to reduce the number of boxes on the floors, cutting power and cooling use.
Adoption issues
- Educating business groups concerning their real storage needs versus both cost and ecological issues. The first response of many groups is “The requirement is I have to be on tier 1 storage.” They need to see their real performance requirements and what tier that best fits. Mediating among the different. Sometimes conflicting personalities of the users is important.
Benefits
- Increased operational efficiencies.
- Higher degree of standardization of storage systems and performance, and a closer match between the storage performance provided and the true needs of each application to reduce waste and expense.
- Stronger partnership and direction to vendors to focus on operational efficiency and decreased carbon footprint in development of new products at all tier levels.
Lessons learned
- Research the available solutions and talk to industry experts and vendors first to learn what is available and how it can be best used.
- Set senior management expectations, gain sponsorship, and provide periodic progress reports to them.
- Provide a consistent message to all concerned – internal staff, vendors, senior management, users – and repeat that message regularly. People are creatures of habit, and unless they are reminded of the need to change regularly they will fall back on what they have always done.
Conclusions
No silver bullet exists that can make an organization green. Instead, it is a matter of many small changes such as eliminating desk printers and reminding users that printing is wasteful and should be avoided whenever possible, or putting automatic turn-off switches on the lights so that rooms will go dark automatically when no one is in them.
Also, green initiatives have to be open ended. Organizations have to work with vendors and stay informed of the environmental implications of new technologies. They need a lab to try out environmentally friendly new technologies and a staff willing to adapt to those technologies when they are ready to be used in production systems.
Footnotes: Legal: © Wikibon 2007. This document is copyright protected by Wikibon and does not fall under the GNU general license terms for Wikibon.org. Links to this article from external sources are allowed, however any other re-distribution of this content for commercial purposes is strictly prohibited. Please contact Wikibon for more information.
The cases cited herein are real however the name of the customer is fictitious. Wikibon case studies are developed independently and their development is not initiated for or funded by any single company. Wikibon reports actual customer experiences and results with no attempt to emphasize any one vendor’s strengths or weaknesses. Read the full disclaimer.