Virtualization is a key factor in implementing green it

When IT managers develop strategies and deploy technologies to reduce power consumption in their facilities, they realize that virtualization not only reduces server sprawl but also saves energy.

The focus of the "Green Computing Summit", held this week by the 1105 Government Information Group (1105 Government Information Group), is the benefits of virtualization and its impact on data center and server consolidation.

Virtualization enables a physical resource (such as a server, an operating system, or a storage device) to work like multiple resources, or to have multiple physical resources work like a resource.

Georgia Fulton County Chief technology Officer and IT department deputy director Jay Terrell said, Fulton County Application Virtualization Technology is the server consolidation. They are now reaping the benefits of training, testing, high availability/disaster recovery, and virtual desktop infrastructure.

Terrell on virtualization and beyond integration, said the Fulton County has more than 200 Wintel servers, dozens of unix/linux servers, mid-range and large computer systems and 6000 PCs. The IT department supports approximately 5,500 end users and 42 departments.

Fulton County found that many servers were underutilized. ' We have a lot of servers that don't do anything, ' says Terrell. The county selected 125 servers to be virtualized, and 31 servers were finally selected. All servers will be virtualized by the end of the year. They also purchased 48 new virtual production servers.

With virtualized environments, Terrell says, we can create any server in the datacenter, except for devices that are not suitable for virtualization, such as some telecommunications systems. Before applying a virtual server to a production environment, IT departments can test the concept of application and operating system upgrades.

Virtualization helps Fulton counties solve disaster recovery and high availability issues more efficiently. ' We don't have the money to do a mirrored data center, ' says Terrell. Therefore, our focus is to replicate the data to a site outside of the real time. Then, there is the issue of how the county can launch a large number of servers during a disaster. So, we use virtualization as a way to re-establish an effective disaster-recovery environment.

In addition, if a server fails, you can rebuild a server within 10 minutes without needing 4 hours. IT departments do not have to spend extra money to buy hardware or to introduce application vendors.

Fulton County will launch a virtual desktop infrastructure in the future, starting with 34 libraries. The county has 700 computers in the library that need to be maintained regularly. The virtual desktop infrastructure will make remote technical support easier and more secure for the machine.

To energy-saving development

In the discussion of virtualization and on-demand data centers, the experts gave a brief overview of how virtualization, cloud computing, and autonomic Computing drive a more energy-efficient computing process.

"Data center administrators need better diagnostic tools to see what their facilities are actually doing," said Robert Ames, deputy chief technology officer at IBM's division. For example, active energy management software can manage every energy-consuming component of IT systems and other devices in the data center. More cooling technology innovation is needed to reduce the power consumption of the system. Air is an inefficient energy refrigerant, so the water refrigerant is back.

However, a future trend that deserves attention is the combination of SOA (service-oriented architecture) and SOI (service-oriented infrastructure). SOA and SOI need to be used together, Ames says. You can use one of them. But it's better to use them together.

Daniel Menasce, senior vice president and computer science professor at George Mason University, says that autonomic computing is the concept of its own start-up, its own configuration, its own optimization, its own repair and its own protection of IT systems. The combination of autonomic computing and virtualization can be used to conserve energy in data centers. The importance of combining virtualization with autonomic computing will grow, he says, because it has the potential to deal with complexity and inadequate resource utilization.