As technology becomes more advanced, our reliance on computers increases with every passing year and the demand we place on our planet is also increasing. We are consuming more power than ever before and emitting billions of metric tons of CO₂ every year just to keep our lives ticking over. The IT industry accounts for about 2% of global CO₂ emissions and within IT, servers and datacenters make up nearly a quarter of this figure. Now, 2% may not seem a lot but when you factor in that in 2006 servers and datacenters accounted for 61 Billion kWh’s of electricity and emitted 55 million metric tons of CO₂ in the US alone. This level of CO₂ equates to the yearly emissions of approximately 11 million cars.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) commissioned a report to the US congress in 2007 detailing the power and environmental impact of the nation’s servers and datacenters. Trust me, it makes for interesting reading! In the report the EPA noted that based on current trends in server and datacenter growth, if nothing is done, we can expect by 2011 power consumption of the servers and datacenters in the US will hit more than 100 Billion kWh’s. This means at least another 15 baseload power plants are needed just to support the increase. Baseload plants are the production facilities used to meet some or all of a given region's continuous energy demand, and produce energy at a constant rate, usually at a low cost relative to other production facilities available to the system. These plants will burn fossil fuels that we are rapidly running out of or create nuclear waste that we cannot safely dispose of. As I said, it makes for an interesting read!

Anyway, enough of the depressing statistics. There is something that can be done. In their report, the EPA detailed three distinct states of change; ‘Improved Operation’, ‘Best Practice’ and ‘State-of-the-Art’. With improved operation, legacy servers are decommissioned and energy efficient servers are adopted wherever possible. In addition, the remaining servers are power managed to a degree. With the best practice model, servers and storage are moderately consolidated and power management is more aggressive and with state-of-the-art, decommissioning, consolidation and power management are aggressive. Of course, the business impact from state-of-the-art will be significant but in return, it offers the biggest energy savings and reductions in CO₂ emissions; in fact an estimate of up to 80% improvement in energy efficiency. However, whilst the report provides some excellent information about the current and projected state of IT, it is designed as a government report and therefore doesn’t contain any technical solutions to these problems. This is where 1E steps in.

1E have been working in and around the PC power management arena for the past 8 years and are now stepping cautiously into the server arena. With the pending release of their NightWatchman Server product, 1E hopes to help companies move towards the ‘State-of-the-Art’ model for their server estates with minimal negative impact on the business. NightWatchman Server helps companies to overcome the most fundamental of issues when considering server consolidation and virtualization (one of the key points underpinning the EPA’s model structure); how does one identify which servers can and should be reallocated or decommissioned and which of the remaining systems should be virtualized? NightWatchman Server utilizes a sophisticated analysis engine to determine decommissioning and virtualization candidates based on ‘Useful Work’. Useful work is defined simply as and processing occurring on a server which directly or indirectly provides service to an end user. For example, if a database server is running but none of the databases are being accessed by either a user or an application servicing a user, that server is considered to be doing ‘Non-Productive’ work. In addition, not only is that server consuming resources unnecessarily, it is also costing money in licenses that are no longer needed. Bottom line; reallocate or decommission. [Look out for my future blog post ‘Are your servers useful?’] Take another server that is performing useful work but only during the hours of 10am and 2pm Monday to Friday. That server by definition may be a good candidate for virtualization to save hardware and power costs. However, if for some reason, virtualization is not feasible, it is possible to reduce the amount of power that the server is consuming during periods of non-productive work with ‘Drowsy Server™’, a power saving mode. 

Look out for Andy Hawkins’ blog post ‘Dynamic power management explained’ for more information on Drowsy Server.

Read the complete post at http://www.1e.com/1EBlogs/post/2009/09/08/NightWatchman-Server-and-the-EPAs-Three-Levels-of-Greatness.aspx