Green Notes

Financial giant Citi is priding itself on the company’s modern data center infrastructure that is flexible enough to take on a variety of requests from clients.Five years ago, Citi ‘s data center faced a number of challenges lack of capacity, limited flexibility limited and high risk of proximity.

Due to lack of cohesive, global data center strategy Citi  decided to reduce the number of data centers worldwide from 52 to 14 strategic sites, including five constructed from the ground up. As a first step, it implemented a global standard for data center construction and engineering. One of Citi’s latest constructions in Georgetown, received Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Gold certification from the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC). It was a team effort with the data center team providing the engineering perspective and the corporate real-estate representatives lending the construction expertise to the projects.

The 100,000-square-foot Georgetown data center delivers 75 watts per square foot of power, expandable to 100W/square foot. Citi has divided the data center into four equally sized rooms. This setup reduces the amount of cabling needed and allows Citi to group technologies by room based on cooling requirements. Compared with the previous newly constructed data center, the Georgetown site uses 800 kilowatts less power for the same footprint, for a 30% reduction in energy costs, the company reports. Virtualization increased server density and led to 30% to 35% reduction in the number of physical servers. Citi was also able to put a cap on Power consumption for technology . According to Computer World , in the 2002 to 2007 timeframe, Citi’s data center power consumption grew by 10% to 12% per year but now thanks to virtualization, Citi has been flat on consumption year over year. Other major Citi projects that have received LEED certification include data centers in Singapore, Frankfurt, Texas, two Citi office parks in the Dallas-Fort Worth area and a 15-story skyscraper in the New York City Borough of Queens.

Projects looking for LEED certification have to meet certain prerequisites and specific performance standards to gain credits. According to the credits won, you will be certified, Silver, Gold or Platinum. The standards prescribe options for site development, water savings, energy efficiency, materials selection and indoor environmental quality. LEED-certified buildings must also adhere to benchmarks set by the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE) promoting reduction in energy consumption. Data centers certified by the LEED Green Building Rating System need not necessarily be owned by huge corporations with attached office space. Innovative design, responsible building practices and expert energy management consultation provided by a green consultation firm like Green Rack Systems can help you achieve your green goals.

While the high tech world buzzes with non stop talk about virtualization and other power monitoring technologies to increase data center efficiency, improvement in basic storage can go a long way to green up your facility. On an average 10 to 40 percent of energy cost in data centers is used to run storage. Yes, managing storage can be expensive especially in a situation like data centers which struggles to cope with excess of data resulting from global initiatives, web commerce, rapidly enhanced computing expectations and security pressures. If businesses do not address their storage budget issues and reduce their data footprint, the problem is likely to blow out of proportion in this era of faster, more ever increasing computing. To keep up with this massive growth, organizations must look at smart storage capacity solutions.

SNIA, Storage Networking Industry Association is a non profit association made up of about 400 companies dedicated to knowledge exchange of end-to-end storage solutions and development of standards in information management products. Some of the energy efficient storage solutions that it recommends are thin provisioning, multi-use backup, virtual clones, de-duplication, compression, using RAID 5 or RAID 6 disk arrays instead of the higher-level standards and smarter coupling of technology and the actual needs.

Most industry experts recommend against indulging in highest grade equipment and to stick to what is actually required instead. Multi purpose, elaborate storage solutions not only cost more but most of the times you may not even be in need of them. So you might be powering them for doing things that you may not even need. So stick with RAID 5 if that’s all you will be using. While Solid State Disk translates to an enhanced performance level, it also costs an arm and a leg. So data that is not critical can be allocated to lower cost tiers and primary storage. Sometimes storage solutions come with automated management software to give information on how much of solid state disk you need to optimize your application. Virtualization of your storage also can go a long way in helping with storage consolidation by providing better storage distribution among servers and reducing hardware requirements. Vendors that provide server virtualization often offer tools to improve the management of storage as well.

The latest buzz in the storage world is data de-duplication also called single instance storage. It significantly reduces the amount of physical disk space needed for backup and other archival functions by configuring data processing and storage functions in a way that removes redundant files, bytes, or blocks of data. It thereby makes sure that only unique data is stored on disks and eliminates redundant files.

The other popular storage solution is thin provisioning which doles out on-demand shared storage to servers instead of allocating tens or hundreds of gigabytes in advance based on anticipated demand which may go unused while consuming a lot of energy. Provisioning helps in cost reduction as it costs less to provide power to one drive loaded to capacity than a number of them each storing a fraction of their capacity.

Please contact us at Green Rack Systems for updating your storage solutions and to reduce your energy bills in the bargain.

In recent times, there has been little that has created the kind of buzz and momentum in the server industry segment as Virtualization. With good reason too! Virtualization has almost single handedly changed the way small to medium businesses conduct their operations. The concept is pretty logical, really and makes a whole lot of common sense when you think about it. Simply put, Virtualization is the method of having several operating systems function within just one server. Each operating system could be performing totally independent unrelated tasks without compromising on the quality of the computing. That is, both the data processing and storage is done within one server as opposed to a traditional system where the network is distributed in an elaborate design comprising of several servers and workstations all attached to their own separate hardware components. In a virtual environment all the physical resources such as additional servers, PCs, storage, hard drives, processors, mother boards etc are totally eliminated. Not only are we saving big time in hardware investment, we are also avoiding excess maintenance costs .With increased server density, we are better able to pinpoint the precise location of hardware failure thereby aiding quicker disaster recovery and reduced unplanned downtime all leading to scalable , more manageable . Employee productivity therefore increases as no one is waiting around endlessly for network issues to be resolved. Consolidation also improves data security significantly. In the context of eco-friendliness, fewer servers mean lesser green house gas emissions. So we are able to contribute towards a cleaner environment. It is sometimes surprising to many that only about 30 percent of the total power used in a server is consumed by the processor itself. The rest goes towards appeasing the cooling systems, memory and power supply. Streamlining the network results in a drastic reduction in power consumption putting green back in your pocket where it rightly belongs. With all the money saved, organizations will be able to reallocate and reprioritize funds to focus on increasing their competitive advantage in the marketplace. For effective virtualization solutions and cost effective green computing consultation, contact our expert team at sales@GreenRackSystems.com / 408-213-8144