Again, just like the "Virtualisation - a bit of a snapshot" article below, this piece was written a while ago for a broader audience than this blog typically addresses, but I would like to post it nonetheless.
Whilst doubters remain, cynically citing vendor marketing spin, concerning the real impact that such things as virtualisation have on energy consumption and carbon footprints, companies such as Citrix do in fact provide undeniable and measurable improvements.
Getting fewer servers to do the same job, using XenServer for example, is the fundament. Other products though, particularly within the Citrix portfolio, such as XenApp Platinum or Citrix Online, enable secure remote access and fuel-saving work-from-home environments and these also contribute substantially.
As most IT managers are now aware, server virtualisation vastly reduces the amount of servers required to service the environment. This impacts not only energy consumption in powering the actual devices, but also the considerable air conditioning required to keep the data-centres at optimum temperature.
Citrix incorporate a product called Provisioning Server into the Platinum version of their XenServer solution. Taking things to the extreme, this could provide another stepping stone towards the Holy Grail of using energy only when that energy is actually required. Instead of having a fully functional data-centre running all day and all night, regardless of whether it's actually in use or not, Provisioning Server, in tandem with one or two other solutions, provides the capability to fire up servers and take them down again according to time of day and the usage requirements of the organisation.
In an ideal world, an administrator could effectively dismantle the data-centre, or reduce it down to a bare minimum, at 10pm and then start it all back up again at 6am the next morning. This could involve the servers running the same workloads as the previous day or indeed completely different ones. Provisioning Server transforms a server from an SAP server, say, into a Navision server, in just a few minutes. The workloads are stored on virtual disks at the back-end and streamed out to the hardware as and when required.
Taking this one step further, Citrix EdgeSight provides metrics around the end user experience and another complementary vendor, RES Software, manages hardware remotely. So, rather than performing these tasks manually, the administrator could set up rules according to the metrics being delivered back from the EdgeSight Server and then configure RES Wisdom to shut down the servers in the evening when demand goes below a certain point. The next morning, when demand begins to grow again, RES wakes up the machines and Provisioning Server churns out the workloads. Again, demand could also determine what type of server each turns out to be.
These products will undoubtedly integrate closely with one another to enable something approaching a 100% dynamic, on-demand data-centre. Citrix’s soon-to-be-released Workflow Studio will then add a further piece to the pie, providing a simple graphical interface for these processes to be simply and quickly put into place. Throw in remote infrastructure management solutions such as Avocent and you create a remarkably flexible, energy-efficient data-centre.
Moving to the desktop, when you consider a PC uses around 75 watts of power and a WYSE thin client requires about 10 or 15% of that, CFOs will surely demand increasingly sound justification from their CTOs for not choosing the “server-based computing” or application delivery methods over traditional user scenarios.
More dedicated device management also comes into the frame – not only in the data-centre but also on the desktop. RES Software, for example, can enforce a power-down of PCs left on overnight. For a company with 150 employees leaving just 15% of the PCs running overnight, the total cost of the software is offset by the energy savings in just 9 months. Such is the effect of high energy prices, the software pays for itself in under a year on that one functionality alone.
IT departments are now becoming cost centres with their own profit & loss accounts, making energy reduction IT’s problem. Reed Managed Services are Citrix’s flagship case study for green IT and energy usage reduction. Admittedly other non IT-related measures were also implemented, but with 64-bit Citrix virtualisation solutions (and rolling out thin clients to almost all their users), Reed: a) got 100 users on a blade instead of 29, b) made their company 100% carbon neutral, c) saved 26% of their IT budget and d) won them a Green Oscar.
Not bad for vendor marketing spin!
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