How to achieve energy efficiency and low cost in data center transformation

In the economic globalization today, enterprises are facing increasingly fierce competition, the changing business needs to bring great business opportunities, but also to the enterprise put forward a greater challenge. Of course, for businesses increasingly rely on information enterprises, this trend also to the Enterprise data center put forward new requirements and changes. Looking at it trends over the last few years, renowned consultants such as IDC, Gartner and ESG have come to the view that it needs to be more efficient and reasonable to support business in a trend of diminishing or not increasing it budgets. Therefore, the transformation of the data center has become the topic of the future development of enterprises.

The hottest it topic in years is virtualization and cloud computing, there is no doubt that the most direct reflection of the trend of data center transition: The traditional single application deployed on a single server in a way that can not fully utilize the data center IT resources, in the waste of resources, but also to the data center management has brought great difficulties and challenges, More noteworthy is that a large number of servers, storage equipment to the data center room space costs, energy costs have brought a significant increase, these long-term costs are the biggest concern of enterprise users. The virtualization technology based on X86 architecture has been greatly developed in the last ten years, it makes it easier to reduce the cost of data center equipment, improve the efficiency of servers, storage, and so on, and reduce long-term costs such as space and energy consumption, and the data center must make full use of virtualization technology in order to improve its support to the business through transformation.

Beijing Cancer Hospital Information Center chief Engineer Heng said: "Virtualization not only saves us a lot of room space, but also the cost of power is effectively controlled, we currently have more than 20 applications deployed in the X86 server virtual machine, if replaced by the past, each application only deployed on a single server, In the security consideration, each application and then configure the dual-machine mode, for each application installer, security maintenance and so on these work, the data center IT resources are not fully utilized, but also bring a lot of power, space and human costs. ”

In fact, from the perspective of energy efficiency and low cost, the success of Enterprise data Center transformation is largely based on the user's understanding and application degree of virtualization technology. Of course, the enterprise to VMware's virtualization products need to pay special attention; However, the server is the data center energy consumption and space occupancy "large", which is the CPU processor is one of the main components of server energy consumption. Therefore, enterprise users also need to focus on the underlying hardware virtualization technology, because they are not only related to VMware virtualization software can be better run, but also related to the server's energy consumption and space costs can be reduced, more related to enterprise Data Center transformation can be high energy consumption and low-cost.

Processor vendors attach great importance to low-level virtualization and energy-saving technologies, such as Intel's belief that virtualization has evolved from the initial consolidation and flexible resource management phases to the enterprise cloud phase, which actually requires enterprise data centers to be transformed into highly flexible, resilient extensibility, Reliable security and an efficient and energy-saving architecture. Essentially, this transformation is a process of highly virtualized resources and flexible scheduling. This will produce a large number of virtual machines, virtual IO, virtual data, if the user can not do the server at the bottom of the virtualization process, no doubt will not guarantee VMware and other virtual machine software safe, efficient and reliable operation, The energy efficiency and low cost of data centers undoubtedly become empty talk, so let's take Intel's virtualization technology as an example to see how it helps the User data center transition to achieve energy efficiency and low cost:

A large number of virtualization machines produce the most direct response to the large number of virtual Io, resulting in a data center for scalability and bandwidth requirements, which requires that the processor not only need strong processing performance, but also need to have more efficient and reasonable virtual I/O processing. Multi-core multithreading of Intel Xeon processors, support for large memory enable the server to support more virtual machines, and more crucially, Intel VT Virtualization technology is as good as virtualization I/O processing.

Intel Virtualization Technology VT enables data centers to support more virtual machines, effectively reducing the number and footprint of servers and increasing the utilization of server resources. At the same time, we can find that the purpose of virtualization is to be able to provide energy saving, efficient service, so it also for the server's energy-saving technology put forward higher requirements. Intel uses intelligent power technology in this area, by automatically reducing the processor and memory to the lowest energy state to meet the current workload, while also reducing the impact on performance, to maximize energy efficiency, reduce user consumption costs.

Intel's proactive Data center power management strategy is very much in line with the current data center's need to reduce power, improve efficiency, and reduce costs. The Intel Smart Power Node Manager monitors and reports on the power consumption of the data center system, and is able to formulate policies to limit the maximum power consumption of the system while dynamically adjusting the p&t-state. In Intel's latest Xeon processor E7, Intel has also further optimized intelligent power technology, enabling a more efficient reduction of partial activity and idle power consumption, and support for low voltage DIMMs and lower memory cache power consumption.

Summary: In the advent of the cloud computing era, user Data center transformation is an inevitable trend, the pursuit of energy efficiency and low cost has become the consensus of the enterprise, users pay attention to VMware virtual machine application level, but also need to pay attention to like Intel Virtualization technology, because no matter how good the virtualization Technology software layer, Without good underlying hardware technical support, the so-called Data Center transformation, the energy efficiency of data centers, the reduction of power costs and space costs of data centers, etc. will be empty talk.

(Responsible editor: The good of the Legacy)