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General Information
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March 27, 2009
• Vol.31 Issue 11
Page(s) 40 in print issue
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Green & Virtual
Book Explores Developments In Facilities, Servers, Storage & More
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“The Green and Virtual Data Center”
Author: Greg Schulz
Publisher: CRC/Auerbach Publications—Taylor & Francis Group
Price: $79.95
Format: Hardcover, 376 pages
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A new “green revolution,” fueled by fears of human-caused climate change, is bringing about a new era of technology development. Given IT’s increasing share of power consumption, data centers will be a central front in the battle for greater energy efficiency and sustainability.
In his new book, “The Green and Virtual Data Center,” Greg Schulz writes, “Green washing and green hype may fade away, but PCFE (Power, Cooling, Floor space, and Environment) and related issues will not, so addressing them is essential to IT, business growth, and economic sustainment in an environmentally friendly manner.”
The book reviews the latest developments in facilities, server, storage, networking, and monitoring technologies and provides a roadmap of how each can be used to create next-generation data centers that combine efficiency with scalability.
Problems Facing Data Centers
Schulz contends that public and media concern over climate change and other environmental problems, which have fueled interest in green products and technologies, coincides with separate but related problems facing data centers: increasing power and cooling demands. Unsustainable growth in power usage was challenging IT managers long before it became a green issue, but now the two have become linked. “Green IT” has become the label for strategies to increase data center efficiency.
The book discusses the myriad ways IT can enhance efficiency, but as the title indicates, virtualization is a key technology enabling this new generation of data center. Yet virtualization alone isn't sufficient. "Server or storage consolidation in general reduces the number of physical units to be managed, but server and storage virtualization in their current forms do not help to aggregate or consolidate the number of operating systems or application instances,” Schulz says.
As Schulz uses the term, virtualization implies much more than merely running a handful of VMs on a new server. “A virtual data center can, and should, be thought of as an information factory that needs to run 24x7, 365 days a year.” Schulz contends that data centers are key corporate assets, not cost centers.
Implementing a virtualized information factory requires breaking down traditional IT silos between hardware and applications groups; server, storage, and networking teams; and even data center and facilities management. Schulz believes a formalized IRM (infrastructure resource management) program can bridge these functional and technology gaps. Another important component of next-generation data centers is comprehensive measurement of IT resource usage and performance, with defined metrics to assess ongoing health and project future needs.
Future Information Factories
Schulz not only lays out a compelling vision for future information factories, but also provides ample background material on their supporting technologies, including power, cooling, servers, storage, and networking. Schulz writes for two audiences in combining the big-picture strategic view with a nuts-and-bolts engineering text. Thus, it’s probably better to read “The Green and Virtual Data Center” as a handbook or reference guide rather than a linear text and start with the detailed table of contents to find specific areas of interest.
Economic and environmental megatrends have converged to make efficiency and frugality the most important of IT virtues. Schulz’s book provides an excellent primer for those wanting to understand how to create data centers for this new paradigm.
by Kurt Marko
Key Concepts
• Enterprise data centers are faced with various power, cooling, floor space, and associated environmental health and safety issues that affect their ability to grow without disrupting or reducing quality of service.
• Green technologies actually address real-life limits and constraints on data center power, cooling, and floor space, not just abstract environmental goals.
• The overriding goal of next-generation data centers is to manage more data and IT resources in a smaller footprint.
• “Green” is often a buzzword used by marketers to sell products, but green objectives of greater efficiency are complementary to the goal of extending enterprise IT budgets. |
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