Energy consumption is a critical issue for IT organizations today, whether the goal is to reduce cost, save the environment or keep your datacenter running. In the United States alone, datacenters consumed $4.5 billion worth of electricity in 2006. Industry analyst Gartner1 estimates that over the next 5 years, most enterprise data centers will spend as much on energy (power and cooling) as they do on hardware infrastructure.
Save Energy by Eliminating Underutilization and Server Sprawl
Virtualization can reduce energy costs and consumption by up to 80%. Most servers and desktops today are in use only 8-15% of the time they are powered on, yet most x86 hardware consumes 60-90% of the normal workload power even when idle. Virtualization software has advanced resource and memory management features that enable consolidation ratios of 15:1 or more which increase hardware utilization to as much as 85%. Once virtualized, a new feature called Distributed Power Management (DPM) monitors utilization across the datacenter and intelligently powers off unneeded physical servers without impacting applications and users. With virtualization, customers can dramatically reduce energy consumption without sacrificing reliability or service levels.
Reduce the Environmental Impact of IT
Beside the company bottom line effect, virtualization is positively impacting the environment. There are estimates that 1.2 million workloads run in virtual machines, which represents an aggregate power savings of about 8.5 billion kWh—more electricity than is consumed annually in all of New England for heating, ventilation and cooling.
While this is a good start, there are plenty of opportunities for saving even more energy, and money. Analyst firm IDC3 states that the un-utilized server capacity equates to approximately:
- $140 billion
- 3 years supply of hardware
- More than 20 million servers.
At 4 tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) annually per server, these un-utilized servers produce a total of more than 80 million tons of CO2 per year. This is more than is emitted from the country of Thailand and more than half of ALL countries in South America.
Reduce Power Consumption on Corporate Desktops
Companies of all sizes are rapidly exploring and expanding their use of Virtual Workstations which runs desktops as virtual machines in the datacenter. Customers use less energy with Virtual Workstations by replacing underutilized PC desktop hardware with thin clients that consume far less energy. Virtual Workstations also extends the expected lifespan of desktop hardware so you can replace your desktops less frequently.
Virtual Workstations lets you take advantage of the high utilization and advanced capabilities of the proven virtualization platform. Typically, desktop PCs are powered on for the full course of the day, whether users are computing or away from their PC. With Virtual Workstations, desktop computing resources are aggregated in the datacenter with much higher utilization. Virtual desktops can also take advantage of the dynamic workload balancing and distributed power management of a virtual infrastructure.
The intelligent datacenter and intelligent desktop design though virtualization delivers significant power savings to companies of all sizes.. For example, an average sized hospital can reduce energy consumption by up to 72% with Virtual Workstations. But energy savings is just one of many reasons to virtualize desktop PCs. The security, agility, and manageability that Virtual Workstations can provide are also compelling reasons to re-think how you deploy and manage desktop PCs.
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