Friday 25 December 2009

Virtualisation: The Green Argument

Random thought: “Just as we saw an exodus of call centers to India are we about to see a similar exodus of data centers to Iceland”

I have always know that computers consume a lot of power but only recently found out that 50% of the running cost of a server in a data centre can be power consumption. We where installing a number of servers in a data-centre and they were more interested in the power draw than the space taken in the cabinet.

Published savings put power draw at around 50% less in a virtualised environment. This Microsoft study also noted that the quantity of processors and memory tended to be the same in a virtual Microsoft Exchange as a non-virtualised environment; less physical servers but more processors and memory per box.

Even the most basic of server hardware now supports Hardware Virtualisation and a low end 2.4GHz Quad Core processer can handle Small Business Server 2008 Premium virtualised on Hyper-V.

With a significant proportion of the Power Requirement taken up with cooling you can see why Iceland is cashing in on the Data-Centre market. A saving of 40%-60% on the amount of energy required to cool a server in Iceland over that or the UK. I was also told recently that London has just about reached its data centre capacity.

We considered housing these servers in Amsterdam but we needed regular access. If you do not need to touch your servers then housing them abroad is fast becoming a feasible solution even for SMEs.

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