Really! 3. reduce energy costs of data centers (1)

Server virtualization technology is already helping you save money. So why not save more money? The Forrester Research Company introduced the three methods it recommended.

With the global economy on the road to recovery, many enterprises urgently need to deploy new applications and start new market plans, thus increasing investment in servers. Forrester Research found that 25% of enterprises predict that server spending will increase by 5% to 10%; 6% of enterprises predict that the spending will increase by 10% or more. To reduce operating and capital costs, improve disaster recovery, and speed up the delivery of new applications to the market, many enterprises are now turning to server virtualization technology.

However, a new reason for promoting the expansion of enterprises and improving the use of server virtualization technology is gradually emerging: reducing energy consumption. Why? Forrester Research found that there are three main motivations behind it:

Cost. The cost of power and cooling for servers during use actually exceeded the original purchase price. Virtualization Technology reduces the total energy consumption of all servers, so that the same workload can run on fewer physical servers.

Elastic. To ensure normal operation time and service level agreement are guaranteed, virtualization technology can alleviate various constraints on the server in terms of site, power and cooling.

Green. Virtualization technology can reduce the total number of servers, reduce energy-consuming carbon dioxide emissions, and the electronic waste caused by future purchase and disposal of server equipment.

In order to reduce the server's energy cost by up to 65%, and to make full use of virtualization's energy-saving potential, Forrester recommends improving the process from the following three aspects:

1. Increase the overall proportion of virtual servers to physical servers

Enterprises now have the opportunity to increase the application scope of virtualization technology in all server environments and platforms. We found that although about 90% of companies are or are planning to virtualize servers, only 37% of their x86 operating system instances are virtual servers. This number is expected to increase to 65% in two years.

In addition, the degree of virtualization varies greatly, depending on the specific server platform and environment. To maximize energy efficiency, the first step is to increase the application scope of virtualization technology in all environments and platforms as a whole. To ensure that you are truly energy-saving, you must shut down or stop servers that no longer process any workloads. Forrester's green IT maturity evaluation method introduces the need to achieve the following virtualization objectives to reach a level of Level 4 Green IT maturity: 1. Improvements are needed (virtualization is adopted for 1% to 25% of systems); 2. Continuous Improvement (virtualization is adopted for 26% to 50% of systems ); 3. Mature (virtualization is adopted for 51% to 75% of systems); 4. Best of the same type (virtualization is used for 76% to 100% of systems ).