Alexandria Networks - Keeping Your Business Moving

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.

- Download the Energy Efficiency Whitepaper

- Download the Reducing Energy Costs Solution Brief

- View the Webcast recording

Save Energy by Eliminating Server Sprawl and Underutilization

VMware customers reduce their energy costs and consumption by up to 80% through virtualization. Most servers and desktops today are in use only 5-15% of the time they are powered on, yet most x86 hardware consumes 60-90% of the normal workload power even when idle. VMware virtualization 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 feature of VMware Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) called Distributed Power Management (DPM) monitors utilization across the datacenter and intelligently powers off unneeded physical servers without impacting applications and users. With VMware 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. Gartner2 estimates that 1.2 million workloads run in VMware 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.

Read the Gartner report on "How IT Management Can 'Green' the Data Center”.

¹Source: Gartner, Inc. "Eight Critical Forces Shape Enterprise Data Center Strategies" by Rakesh Kumar, 02/08/07
²Source: Gartner, Inc.“Gartner Says Agility Will Become the Primary Measure of Data Centre Excellence by 2012”,10/24/07
³Source: IDC, “Enterprise Class Virtualization 2.0 Application Mobility, Recovery, and Management”, Doc # DR 2007_5MEW, February 2007