Sep 16th, 2008 |
David SparkEnergy Camp NYC @ Interop_NY: Simplification and optimization is the key to green IT
The real cost to IT is complexity, said Gennaro (Jerry) Cuomo, IBM’s WebSphere CTO. The real problem is rigid software and hardware. Both are significant contributors to the explosion of carbon footprints in the data center, Cuomo said.
In his presentation at Energy Camp @ Interop in NY’s Jacob Javits Center, Cuomo argued the solution is simplification and optimization of computing and the data center. That’s the first step to energy savings. IBM is one of the sponsors of Energy Camp.
There are energy savings all around, but you’ll see the greatest opportunities across the IT stack (applications to middleware to hardware). Like with most project, you’ll see the greatest benefits when implemented from the top down, but getting adoption is not easy.
It’s easier to save energy costs from the bottom up as James Governor also mentioned in his presentation.
IT hasn’t paid energy costs, so they haven’t worried about it
More than half of the energy costs are actually paid by the facilities department, said Cuomo. As a result, that’s why IT hasn’t traditionally been paying attention to these costs. As data centers and application usage is growing, energy costs from IT are now a noticeable blip on the company’s radar. IT must monetize the impact of energy.
Be a “rainmaker.” Save costs through virtualization, cloud computing, business process management, and SOA
For IT energy savings, Cuomo redefines the term “rainmaker” as someone who utilizes virtualization, cloud computing, business process management, and SOA (service oriented architecture) to reduce energy savings for the company.
Cuomo pitched the WebSphere Virtual Enterprise as offering a cost reduction solution by bottling their IBM’s energy savings learnings within the product they ship out - from the individual servers up to an entire WebSphere cloud. For example, one way WebSphere saves money is aggregating all your application servers into a single pool and as requests come in, traffic is prioritized across all servers.
This is not how must applications are deployed in the enterprise, said Cuomo. Most customers simply just add another five servers each time they want a new application. That’s easy to deploy, but over time having these five-server clusters with varying levels of utilization is highly inefficient.
Look across every point in the process to save energy costs. If you only use hardware you’ll only get a fraction of the savings you can get. You need to look at the combination of hardware, software, and usage.
Most organizations have hardware redundancies. If one server fails, there’s another one that can take over the workload to maintain business continuity. To save energy costs, Cuomo recommends organizations force this behavior with soft shut downs or fail overs. He suggests companies purposely shift application loads to a smaller group of servers and even shut down some of the servers during slow times, like night time.
Another area of energy savings is how tough a software application works on a piece of hardware. Cuomo brings up the example of processing XML code. A byte of XML requires 13 CPU cycles on a standard CPU. Cuomo said that on its DataPower XG4 card, a byte of XML only requires one cycle. If you operate a lot of XML code, shifting processing to these cards could save a lot of energy costs.
Detect inefficiencies within the organization and solve it with enterprise 2.0 solutions and flexible SOA
Business processes are often inflexible and inefficient. We all see the time and cost inefficiencies. But as you might imagine, if you’ve got time and cost inefficiencies, then there’s definitely energy costs associated with that. Number one solution suggests Cuomo is the elimination of paper. Get business and IT talking electronically. This definitely feeds into the world of enterprise 2.0 applications which has tons of benefits such as knowledge management, collaboration, innovation, and communications tools that younger workers adapt to far easier than just email and paper.
If you can’t solve your inefficiencies then you’re in trouble. Luckily, SOA allows for the flexibility to model what’s going on, control it, and then deploy the concept in an automatic format.
Make sure you check out the summary of all coverage from Interop NY.
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