My youngest daughter has assumed a position of authority for herself on our house as the resident expert on environmental issues, a scepter she beats us with every time we throw a plastic bottle in the trash, walk out of a room with the lights on, or bring home groceries in anything but a reusable cloth sack. Despite the occasional aggravation of being called out simply for doing something I have been doing for forty years, in large part I applaud her efforts – the global problem is getting worse, and her generation’s burden will likely be greater than mine with regard to making amends. Plus, she’s saving me money, a worthy end indeed.
So while the lectures may get a bit tedious at times, I know the end result will be a good one, both for me and everyone else. And that got me to thinking about what she might do if turned loose in the data centers of the many verticals we work in every day. Within minutes I suspect the walls would be covered with the “Reduce, Reuse” stickers that seem to come home from school in endless supply.
Without drawing attention yet again to your 401k statement, there is little question that organizations are all about REDUCING at this point – fewer people, less space, and lower overhead. Yet with technology being such a key differentiator for many companies and institutions, it is important to reduce with an eye towards efficiency, and without any negative impact on utility. The good news is that from the branch office to the central data center there are many technologies available to accomplish this goal, often with matching benefits in simplification of management that are critical to today’s smaller IT staff.
Branch offices often pose a challenge for many reasons: they are difficult to staff, they often disrupt economy-of-scale pricing models, and they generate high risks for redundant purchases that are poorly utilized and expensive to maintain and replace. For these and other reasons, many companies are always looking for opportunities to centralize resources, thereby REDUCING the need for remote personnel, servers, and other hardware. To make consolidation projects work without negative user impact it becomes critical to provide the bandwidth that key applications require. Solutions from companies like Riverbed, Juniper, and Cisco offer command and control over WAN bandwidth, allowing applications to be centralized and to simplify delivery and management. Riverbed has actually taken the argument one step further, offering virtualized implementations of services (DNS, DHCP, Print, etc.) that do not lend themselves to centralization, further REDUCING the number of servers required at the branch office.
As employees and customers touch the edge of your network for information and services, it can be difficult to keep physical resources aligned with actual need. Web servers assigned to provide specific application services often get bogged down managing large numbers of connections, something they aren’t made to do. Solutions such as F5’s BIG-IP provide local traffic management designed to maximize bandwidth, and to offload tasks from your web servers – usually REDUCING the number you need to meet your service level goals. F5 augments this capability with balancing at a global level, allowing multiple sites to resource-burst into each other, offering internally-managed cloud computing concepts and REDUCING the need to build out each site to peak usage parameters.
Once inside the data center, it’s common to see the room bursting at the seams, with organizations struggling to find space, power, and cooling to satisfy the needs of growing storage repositories and archive platforms. More efficient power supplies advertised by myriad vendors are a good start, but often the problem calls for more drastic measures. Consider a solution from Isilon Systems, who has partnered with Ocarina Networks with the intention of doing the unthinkable for a disk vendor – optimizing online storage and thereby REDUCING storage footprint and resource consumption. Isilon’s vision is towards the big picture, helping its customers manage a key problem with Ocarina’s revolutionary de-duplication and compression capabilities and allowing them the flexibility to create purpose-built storage repositories that fit both the need and the room. Also bringing a creative approach to the storage market is Data Direct Networks, whose drive capacity metrics are dramatically REDUCING storage footprints, and whose D-MAID power feature automatically takes advantage of data dormancy and can create power reductions on the order of 80%.
The process of REDUCING the number of servers in the data center has been underway for some time, as standalone servers evolved into blade servers, and yet again into virtualized environments. The lure of eliminating servers and the ability to repurpose or recreate virtual machines with little more than a drag and drop is strong, but it is important to understand application flow to be able to identify good targets for virtualization, as well as to have reliable metrics to demonstrate that these projects are producing the promised results. Lakeside Software provides such a tool, offering network and application analysis designed to make virtualization projects deliver.
Lakeside takes us further to the end of our journey – the central office PC that sits on all night, all weekend, draining power and increasing costs without adding benefit. Users won’t remember to turn off their machines every night, and even if they did it would become impossible to manage the virus software update that you have scheduled for 2am. What’s needed is a centralized way to learn workstation usage patterns to establish automated sleep cycles that can be overridden by either scheduled software maintenance or unscheduled workflow – all while slowly but steadily REDUCING the electric bill.
My daughter won’t be showing up to ask you to take these steps, but someone will. The CIO needs to do more with fewer people and less space; the CFO wants the monthly expense to go down; your customers want to see you demonstrate a concern for the environment – regardless of who is telling you to reduce, the resources and tools you need are out there, and we’re here to help connect you to them.