IT COMPANIES BET ON VIRTUALISATION

Vanisha Joseph
The Economic Times

The human body is often hailed as a well-coordinated machine controlled by clear signals from the brain. Imagine multiple brains supervising the body’s functions. Clash of signals, wastage of resources and overstraining of body parts can be visualised, making the collapse of the machine inevitable. Similar would have been the fate of datacentres without virtualisation. Datacentres, controlled by multiple servers, were frowned at for exhaling large amounts of carbon, feeding the global warming albatross.

These multiple servers sucked in a lot of energy resulting in high maintenance costs, excessive heat generation and poor IT infrastructure. Datacentres were bound to destroy the environment and dig deep holes into the pockets of IT companies, pulling the shutters down for some. But virtualisation transformed them into green apparatus — eco-friendly machines topped with the ‘money honey’. It did so by allowing servers, earlier dedicated to one application, to be used for diverse applications. As a result, server efficiency and flexibility improved reducing the total numbers of energy-gulping physical servers.

With eco reality being integrated into the IT business agenda today, virtualisation is the green computing ace IT companies are betting on. The first eco-friendly perk virtualisation boasts of is power saving. With most servers and desktops being used only for 8-15 percent of the time they are powered on, machines are eating 60-90 percent of power when idle. Virtualisation helps reduce energy consumption by 80-90 percent. Marching ahead with this energy-efficiency banner is VMware. Be its distributed resource scheduler (DRS) that intelligently powers off unneeded physical servers or VMotion that allows the client to move an entire running virtual machine from one server to another or ESX Server letting customers to run 10 applications on a single hardware, VMware has plugged in the power-saving socket. “Every server consolidated in our application saves about 7,000 kWh per year, which is equal to removing 1.5 cars from the road or planting 55 trees,” says Ganesh Mahabala, regional director, Vmware (India & Saarc).

Not lagging behind are Sun Microsystem, IBM, AMD, Cisco, Foundry and Nortel. From IBM’s Virtualisation Engine to AMD’s Rapid Virtualisation Indexing, allowing the client to host more virtual machines (VMs) per server, to Foundry’s Vipron that cuts the number of application servers and ADCs needed saving on power to Cisco’s Inter-VSAN routing (IVR) eliminating the need for having dedicated resources for each SAN fabric, IT companies are pressing the energy-saving buttons.

“Computers are heat inefficient. If 500w is pumped in to operate them, another 500w is required to cool them. By reducing the number of servers, heat emissions fall, cutting the CO2 emissions the cooling appliances breathe out,” says Karthik Ramarao, director (technologies), systems practice, Sun Microsystems India. Virtualisation also cuts on hardware requirement, softening the tone of the e-waste outcry that the IT sector has heard for generations.

The green virtualisation flag being waved by the IT sector also brings in green bucks, as it is a cost-cutting strategy. Be it IBM’s consolidation of thousands servers onto 30 System Z mainframes expected to save $250 million over five years or Nortel’s CPU optimisation that can help an enterprise save $530K on power costs or Cisco’s Inter-VSAN routing that allows resources to be effectively shared, saving up to 67 percent on power, virtualisation shrinks the power bills, filling the pocket of IT companies. As per Gartner estimates, companies that ignore virtualisation will pay 15-20 percent more than they need to for IT by 2008.

Virtualisation also reduces the need for expensive infrastructure upgrades to deal with increased power and cooling demands. “Of every rupee spent on server power consumption, an additional 60 paisa is required to spend on cooling and backup. Virtualisation saves 60 percent of the energy bills on cooling and backup,” says Vamsi Krishna, senior manager (technical), AMD India.