Showing posts with label Oathout. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Oathout. Show all posts

Thursday, February 11, 2010

Smart Grid for Data Centers Better Manages Electricity to Slash IT Energy Spending, Frees-Up Wasted Capacity

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on implementing energy efficiency using smart grids in enterprise data centers to slash costs and gain added capacity.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Download the transcript. Learn more. Sponsor: Hewlett-Packard.

Dana Gardner: Hi, this is Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions, and you’re listening to BriefingsDirect.

Today, we present a sponsored podcast discussion on gaining control over energy use and misuse in enterprise data centers. More often than not, very little energy capacity analysis and planning is being done on data centers that are five years old or older. Even newer data centers don’t always gather and analyze the available energy data being created amid all of the components.

Nowadays, smarter, more comprehensive energy planning tools and processes are being directed at this problem. It’s a lifecycle approach from the data centers to full automation benefits. Automation software for capacity planning and monitoring has been designed and improved to best match long-term energy needs and resources in ways that cut total cost, while gaining the truly available capacity from old and new data centers.

These so-called smart grid solutions jointly cut data center energy costs, reduce carbon emissions, and can dramatically free up capacity from overburdened or inefficient infrastructure.

Such data gathering, analysis and planning can break the inefficiency cycle that plagues many data centers where hotspots can mismatch cooling needs, and underused and under-needed servers are burning up energy needlessly. Done well, such solutions as Hewlett Packard's (HP) Smart Grid for Data Center can increase capacity by 30-50 percent just by gaining control over energy use and misuse.

We're here today with two executives from HP to delve more deeply into the notion of Smart Grid for Data Center. Please join me in welcoming Doug Oathout, Vice President of Green IT Energy Servers and Storage at HP. Welcome Doug.

. . . The drivers behind data center transformation are customers who are trying to reduce their overall IT spending . . .



Doug Oathout: Thank you, Dana.

Gardner: We're also here with John Bennett, Worldwide Director of Data Center Transformation Solutions at HP. Welcome back to the show, John.

John Bennett: Thank you very much, Dana. Glad to be here.

Gardner: John, let me start with you, if you don’t mind. Let’s set up a little bit of the context for this whole energy lifecycle approach. It’s not isolated. It’s part of a larger set of trends that we loosely call data center transformation (DCT). What’s going on with DCT and how important is the role these energy conversation approaches play?

Bennett: DCT, as we’ve discussed before Dana, is focused on three core concepts, and behind it, energy is another key focus for that work. But, the drivers behind data center transformation are customers who are trying to reduce their overall IT spending, either flowing it to the bottom-line or, in most cases, trying to shift that spending away from management and maintenance and onto business projects, business priorities, and innovation in support of the business and business growth.

We also see increasing mandates to improve sustainability. It might be expressed as energy efficiency in handling energy costs more effectively or addressing green IT. The issues that customers have in executing on this, of course, is that the facilities, their people, their infrastructure and applications, everything they are spending and doing today -- if they don’t change it -- can get in the way of them realizing these objectives.

Data center strategy

So, DCT is really about helping customers build out a data center strategy and an infrastructure strategy. That is aligned to their business plans and goals and objectives. That infrastructure might be a traditional shared infrastructure model. It might be a fabric infrastructure model of which HP’s converged infrastructure is probably the best and most complete example of that in the marketplace today. And, it may indeed be moving to private cloud or, as I believe, some combination of the above for a lot of customers.

The secret is doing so through an integrated roadmap of data-center projects, like consolidation, business continuity, energy, and such technology initiatives as virtualization and automation.

Energy has definitely been a major issue for data-center customers over the past several years. The increased computing capability and demand has increased the power needed in the data center. Many data centers today weren’t designed for modern energy consumption requirements. Even data centers that were designed even five years ago are running out of power, as they move to these dense infrastructures. Of course, older facilities are even further challenged. So, customers can address energy by looking at their facilities.

More recently, we in the industry have been focused on the infrastructure and layout of the data center. Increasingly, we're finding that we need to look at management -- managing the infrastructure and managing the facilities in order to address the energy cost issues and the increasing role of regulation and to manage energy related risk in the data center.

That brings us not only to energy as a key initiative in DCT, but on Smart Grid for Data Center as a key way of managing it effectively and dynamically.

I think the best control of energy is probably better described as built-in and not layered on.



Gardner: You know, John, it’s interesting. When I hear you describe this, it often sounds as if you are describing security. I know that sounds odd, but security has some of the same characteristics. You can’t look at it individually. It needs to be taken in as a comprehensive view that there are risks associated, and that it becomes management-intensive. Maybe we can learn from the way in which people approach security. Perhaps, they should also be thinking along similar lines when they approach energy as a problem?

Bennett: That’s an interesting analogy, and the point I would add to that, Dana, is that the best security is built-in, not layered on. I think the best control of energy is probably better described as built-in and not layered on.

Gardner: Let’s go to Doug. Doug. Tell me what the problem is out there. What are folks facing and how inefficient are their data centers really? What kind of inefficiency is common now?

Oathout: Dana, what we're really talking about is a problem around energy capacity in a data center. Most IT professionals or IT managers never see an energy bill from the utility. It's usually handled by the facility. They never really concentrate on solving the energy consumption problem.

Problem area

Where problems have arisen in the past is when a facility person says that they can’t deploy the next server or storage unit, because they're out of capacity to build that new infrastructure to support a line of business. They have to build a new data center. What we're seeing now is customers starting to peel the onion back a little bit, trying to find out where the energy is going, so they can increase the life of their data center.

To date, very few clients have deployed comprehensive software strategies or facility strategies to corral this energy consumption problem. Customers are turning their focus to how much energy is being absorbed by what and then, how do they get the capacity of the data center increase so they can support the new workloads.

The way to do that is to get the envelope cleared up so we know how much is left. What we're seeing today is that software, hardware, and people need to come together in a process that John described in DCT, an energy audit, or energy management.

All those things need to come together, so that customers can now start taking apart their data center, from an analysis perspective, to find out where they are either over-provisioned or under-provisioned, from a capacity standpoint, so they know where all the energy is going. Then, they can then take some steps to get more capability out of their current solution or get more capability out of their installed equipment by measuring and monitoring the whole environment.

Gardner: John, we’ve already done a podcast on converged infrastructure, and I don’t want to belabor that point too much, but it strikes me that going about this data center energy exercise in alignment with a converged-infrastructure approach would make a lot of sense. We're starting to see commonality in ways we hadn’t seen before.

Bennett: There’s very strong commonality there, and I’ll ask Doug to address that in a minute. When I described the best energy solution as being built-in, that really captured the essence of what we're doing with converged infrastructure. It’s not only integrating the elements of the data center, but better instrumenting them from a management and automation perspective. One of the key drivers for making management and automation decisions about provisioning and workload locations will be energy cost and consumption. Doug?

Oathout: Converged infrastructure is really about deploying IT in the optimal way to support a workload. We talk about energy and energy management. You're talking about doing the same thing. You want to deploy that workload to a server and storage networking environment that will do the amount of work you need with the least amount of energy.

The concept of converged infrastructure applies to data center energy management. You can deploy a particular workload onto an IT infrastructure that is optimally designed to run efficiently and optimally designed to continually run in an efficient way, so that you know you're getting the most productive work from the least energy and the more energy efficient equipment infrastructure sitting underneath it.

An example of this is identifying what type of application you want to run on your infrastructure and then deploying the right amount of resources to run that application. You're not deploying more and not deploying less, but deploying the optimal amount of resources that you know that you are getting the best productivity for the energy budget that you have.

Adding resources

As that workload grows over time, you have the capability built into the software and into the monitoring, so that you can add more resources to that pool to run that application. You're not over-provisioning from the start and you're not under-provisioning, but you're getting the optimal settings over time. That's what's really important for energy, as well as efficiency, as well as operating within a data center environment.

You want to keep it optimal over time. You don’t want to set up silos to start. You don’t want to set up over-provisioning to start. You want to be able to optimally run your infrastructure long-term. Therefore, you must have tools, software, and hardware that is not only efficient, but can be optimized and run in an optimized way over a long period of time.

Gardner: Another trend in the data center nowadays is moving toward shared-services approaches, viewing yourself as a service provider, and billing based on these workloads and on the actual demand. It seems to me that energy needs to fit into that as well. Perhaps, as we think about private cloud, where we’ve got elasticity of resources, energy needs to be elastic, along with the workload allocation. So, quickly, John, what about the notion of shared services and how energy plays into that as well as this private cloud business?

Bennett: It definitely plays, as both you and Doug have highlighted. As one moves into a private cloud model, it accentuates the need to have a better real-time perspective of energy consumption and what devices consume and are capable of, in order to manage the assets of the private cloud efficiently and effectively. Whether you have a private cloud, providing a broader set of services, you clearly want to minimize your own cost structures. That's going to be for good energy management as well as other items. Doug?

Oathout: Yeah. With the private cloud implementation and how a converged infrastructure would support that is that you want to bring the amount of resources you need for an application online, but you also want to be able to have the resources available to run a separate set of applications and bring that on line as well.

The living and breathing of a data center is really what we're talking about with a private-cloud infrastructure on a converged infrastructure.



You're managing a group of resources as a pool, so that over time you can manage up resources to run a particular application and then manage them down and put the resources back into pool, so they can be deployed for another application.

The living and breathing of a data center is really what we're talking about with a private-cloud infrastructure on a converged infrastructure. That living and breathing capability is built within the processes and within the infrastructure, so that you can run applications in an optimal way.

Gardner: It's my understanding that some of the public-cloud providers nowadays have built their infrastructure with conservation in mind, because every penny counts when you're in a lower-margin shared service and providing services business. They can track every watt. They know where it's all going. They’ve built for that.

Now, what about some of these older organizations, five years plus? What can be done to retrofit what's out there to be more energy efficient? How does this work toward the older sets?

Oathout: The key to that, Dana, is to understand where the power is going. One of the first things we recommend to a client is to look at how much power is being brought into a data center and then where is it going. You can easily do that through a facility survey or a facility workshop, but the other thing you want to look at is your IT. As you’re upgrading your IT, all the new IT equipment -- whether it be servers or storage or networking -- has power management built into it and has reporting built into it.

Collect information

What you want to do is start collecting that information through software to find out how much power is being absorbed by the different pieces of IT equipment and associate that with the workloads that are running on them. Then, you have a better view of what you're doing and how much energy you're using.

Then, you can do some analysis and use some applications like HP SiteScope to do some performance analysis, to say, "Could I match that workload to some other platform in the infrastructure or am I running it in optimal way?"

Over time, what you can do is you can migrate some of your older legacy workloads to more efficient newer IT equipment, and therefore you are basically building up a buffer in your data center, so that you can then go deploy new workloads in that same data center.

It's really using a process or an assessment to figure out how much energy you're using and where it's going and then deploying to this newer equipment with all the instrumentation built in, along with software to understand where your energy is going.

It's the way to get started but it's also the way to keep yourself in an automated way or keep yourself optimizing over time. You use that software to your benefit, so that you're freeing up capacity, so that you can support the new workload that the businesses need.

The energy curve today is growing at about 11 percent annually, and that's the amount IT is spending on energy in a data center.



Bennett: That's really key, Doug, as a concept, because the more you do at this infrastructure level, the less you need to change the facilities themselves. Of course, the issue with facilities-related work is that it can affect both quality of service and outages and may end up costing you a pretty penny, if you have to retrofit or design new data centers.

Gardner: As I understand it now, we're talking about an initial payback, which would be identifying waste, hotspots, and right cooling approaches, getting some added capacity as a result, while perhaps also cutting cost. But, over time, there's a separate distinct payback, which is that you can control your operational costs and keep them at a lower percentage of your total cost of IT spend. Does that sound about right?

Oathout: That is right, Dana. You can actually decrease the slope of the energy curve. The energy curve today is growing at about 11 percent annually, and that's the amount IT is spending on energy in a data center.

Over time, if you implement more efficient IT, you can actually decrease that slope to something much less than 11 percent growth. Also, as you increase your capacity in your data center in the same power envelope, you could actually start getting a much more efficient infrastructure running in the same power envelope, so you're actually getting to run that IT equipment for free energy, because you’ve freed up that energy from something else.

The idea of decreasing the slope or decreasing your budget is the start, but long term you're going to get more workload for the same budget. You can say the same thing for the IT management budget as well. You're trying to is get more efficiency out of your IT and out of your energy budget to support future workloads.

Gardner: And, the insight that you gain from implementing these sensors and tracking and automation, the ability to employ capacity-planning software, can bring out some hard numbers that allow you to be more predictable in understanding what your energy requirements will be, regardless of whether you are growing, staying the same, or even if you need to downsize your company.

Those numbers, that visibility, is something that can be applied to other assets allocations and important decisions in the enterprise around such things as perhaps carbon taxes and caps, as well as facilities, and even thinking about alternative energy sources.

Different approaches

Oathout: There are a lot of different ways to use green IT. We’ve seen customers implement a consolidation of infrastructure. They took a number of servers, a number of facilities associated with that server and storage environment, and minimize it down to a level that was very useable.

It gave the same service-level agreement (SLA) to their lines of businesses and they received energy credits from governments. They could then use those energy credits for monetary reasons or for conservation reasons. We also see customers, as they do these environmental changes or policies, look for ways that they can better demonstrate to their clients that they are being energy aware or energy efficient.

A lot of our clients use consolidation studies or energy efficiency studies as ways to show their clients that they are doing a very good job in their infrastructure and supporting them with the least possible environmental impact.

We see customers getting certificates, but also using energy consumption reductions as a way to show their clients that they’re being green or being environmentally friendly, just the same as you'd see a customer looking at a transportation company and how energy efficient they are in transporting goods. We see a lot of clients using energy efficiency in multiple ways.

Gardner: We've talked about Smart Grid for Data Centers several times. Now, let's drill down and describe exactly what it is. What are we talking about? What is HP offering in this category?

It's really about visualizing that data, so you can take action on it. Then, it's about setting up policies and automating those procedures to reduce the energy consumption or to manage energy consumption that you have in the data center.



Oathout: Smart Grids for Data Centers gives a CIO or a data-center manager a blueprint to manage the energy being consumed within their infrastructure. The first thing that we do with a Data Center Smart Grid is map out what is hooked up to electricity in the data center, everything from PDUs, UPSs, and error handlers to the IT equipment servers, networking and storage. It's really understanding how that all works together and how the whole topology comes together.

The second thing we do is visualize all the data. It's very hard to say that this server, that server, or that piece of facilities equipment uses this much power and has this kind of capacity. You really need to see the holistic picture, so you know where the energy is being used and understand where the issues are within a data center.

It's really about visualizing that data, so you can take action on it. Then, it's about setting up policies and automating those procedures to reduce the energy consumption or to manage energy consumption that you have in the data center.

Today, our servers and our storage are much more efficient than the ones we had three or four years ago, but we also add the capability to power cap a lot of the IT equipment. Not only can you get an analysis that says, "Here is how much energy is being consumed," you can actually set caps on the IT equipment that says you can’t use more than this. Not only can you monitor and manage your power envelope, you can actually get a very predictable one by capping everything in your data center.

You know exactly, how much the max power is going to be for all that equipment. Therefore, you can do much better planning. You get much more efficiency out of your data center, and you get more predictable results, which is one of the things that IT really strives for, from an SLA to getting those predictable results, day in and day out.

Mapping infrastructure

S
o, really Data Center Smart Grid for the infrastructure is about mapping the infrastructure. It's about visualizing it to make decisions. Then, it's about automating and capping what you’ve got, so you have better predictable results and you're managing it, so that you are not having out wires, you're not having problems in your data centers, and you're meeting your SLA.

Gardner: John, I'm going to grasp for another analogy here, it sounds like, once again, we're up against governance. It's an important concept and topic, when it comes to how to properly do IT, but now we are applying it to energy.

Bennett: That's just the reflection of the fact that for any organization looking to get the most value out of their IT organization, their infrastructure, and operations they need to address governance, as much as they need to address the business services they're providing, as much as they need to address the infrastructure with how they deliver it and how they manage things like energy and security in that environment. It's all connected then.

Gardner: I wonder if we have any examples of how this has worked in practice. Within HP, itself, I assume that you want to cut your energy bills as much as anyone else does, particularly in a down economy or when a growth pattern hasn’t quite kicked in fully. Are there any examples within HP or some customers or clients that you have worked with?

Oathout: In the HP example, our IT organization has gone from 85 data centers down to 6. They've actually reduced the amount of budget we spent on IT from about 4 percent of our overall P&L down to about 2 percent. So, they've done a very good job consolidating and migrating the workload to a smaller set of facilities and a smaller set of infrastructure.

They're getting a huge floor saving capacity back, but are also getting a power saving of 66 percent, versus where they were two years ago.



They're now in the process of automating all that, so long term we will have a much more predictable IT workload from an energy perspective. They're implementing the software to control the energy. They're implementing power capping. They're implementing a converged infrastructure, so they have the ability to share resources amongst application. HP IT has really driven their cost down through this.

We have another example with the Sisters of Mercy Health System, which did a very similar convergence of infrastructure on a smaller scale. In their data center, they freed up 75 percent of their floor space by doing server consolidation, storage consolidation, and energy management. They now have 25 percent of the footprint they used to have from a server-storage physical standpoint, but they are also only using about 33 percent of the energy they used to use within their environment.

So, they're getting a huge floor saving capacity back, but are also getting a power saving of 66 percent, versus where they were two years ago. By doing this converged infrastructure, by doing consolidation, and then managing and capping the IT systems, they’ve got a much more predictable budget to run their IT infrastructure.

Gardner: I suppose getting started is a tough question, because you could get started so many different ways and there is such wide variability in how data centers are constructed and how old they are and what the characteristics are. I almost know the answer to this question so many different ways -- but how do you get started, depending on what your situation is at this particular time?

Efficiency analysis

Bennett: For many customers, if they're struggling to understand where energy is being consumed and how it's being used, we will probably recommend starting with an energy efficiency analysis. That will not only do a thorough evaluation of both the facility and the infrastructure, but provide insight into the kind of savings you can expect from the different types of investment opportunities to reduce energy costs. That’s the general starting point, if you are trying to understand just what’s going on with the energy.

Once you understand what you are doing with energy, then you can dive into looking at a Smart Grid for Data Center solution itself as something to take you even further. Doug, how do you get started with that?

Oathout: Another way to get started, John, is deploying new IT infrastructure. Our ProLiant servers, our Integrity servers, or our storage products have the instrumentation and the monitoring all built into the infrastructure. Deploying those new servers or storage environments allow you to get a picture of how much energy is being used by those, so you can have more predictable power usage going forward.

Customers are using virtualization. Customers are trying to get utilization of the servers and storage environment up to a very efficient level. Having the power management and the energy monitoring being built into those systems allows them to start laying out how much infrastructure they can support in their data center.

One of the keys for us is to start deploying the new pieces of HP IT equipment, which are fully instrumented and energy efficient. You'll have the snapshot of actual power consumption, and, if you upgraded your IT facilities over a longer period of time, you can get a full snapshot of your infrastructure. You can actually increase the capacity of the data center just by deploying the new products that are much more efficient than the ones three or four years ago.

There are places in the world, such as the UK or California, where the power you have coming into your facilities is all the power you are ever going to have. So, you really have to manage inside of that type of regulatory constraint.



Bennett: That’s a good example of this integrated roadmap idea behind DCT. I characterize it as modernization, consolidation, and virtualization. Really
it's, stepping up the capabilities or their infrastructure to both reduce cost, improve efficiencies, improve quality of service, and reduce the energy costs.

As Doug highlighted, after that phase of work is done, you've laid the ground work to consider taking advantage of that from an instrumentation and management point of view. You can augment that with further instrumentation of the racks and the data center resources in order to really implement a complete Smart Grid for Data Center solution. It's a stepping stone. It leverages the accomplishments done for other purposes to take you further into a good efficient operation.

Gardner: Based on some of the capacity improvements and savings, it certainly sounds like a no-brainer, but I have to imagine, John, that in the future, it's going to become less of an option and something that’s essentially mandatory.

An 11 percent annual growth in energy cost is not a sustainable trajectory. We have to expect that energy costs will be volatile, but, perhaps, over time more expensive, whether in real terms or when you factor in the added cost of taxation, carbon taxes and caps, and what have you. So, this is really something that has to be done. You might as well start sooner than later.

Bennett: Yes. And, regulations and governance from outside agencies is currently an issue. There are places in the world, such as the UK or California, where the power you have coming into your facilities is all the power you are ever going to have. So, you really have to manage inside of that type of regulatory constraint.

We have voluntary programs. Perhaps the most visible one is the European Data Center Code of Conduct, and clearly we expect to see more regulation of IT and facilities, in general, moving forward. Carbon reduction mandates impacting organizations are going to be external drivers behind doing this. Of course, if you get your hands ahead of the game, and you do this for business purposes, you will be well set to manage that when it comes.

Gardner: We've been talking about how to gain control over energy use and perhaps misuse in enterprise data centers. We were talking about how a Smart Grid approach, a comprehensive approach, using the available data to start creating capacity management capabilities, makes a tremendous amount of sense.

I want to thank our guests on this discussion. We've been joined by Doug Oathout,Vice President of Green IT Enterprise Servers and Storage at HP. Thank you, Doug.

Oathout: Thank you, Dana.

Gardner: We've also been joined by John Bennett, Worldwide Director of Data Center Transformation Solutions at HP. Thanks again, John.

Bennett: My pleasure, Dana. Thank you.

Gardner: This is Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions. You have been listening to a sponsored BriefingsDirect Podcast. Thanks very much for listening, and come back next time.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Download the transcript. Learn more. Sponsor: Hewlett-Packard.

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on implementing energy efficiency using smart grids in enterprise data centers to slash costs and gain added capacity. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2010. All rights reserved.

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Monday, February 08, 2010

Converged Infrastructure Approach Paves Way for Improved Data Center Productivity

Transcript of a sponsored BriefingsDirect podcast on achieving cost control and increased utilization through coordinated design, open standards and application-specific infrastructure.

For more information on virtualization and how it provides a foundation for Private Cloud, plan to attend the HP Cloud Virtual Conference taking place in March. To register for this event, go to:
Asia, Pacific, Japan - March 2
Europe Middle East and Africa - March 3
Americas - March 4

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Download the transcript. Learn more. Sponsor: Hewlett-Packard.

Dana Gardner: Hi, this is Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions, and you’re listening to BriefingsDirect.

Today, we present a sponsored podcast discussion on improved data center productivity for a natural progression toward converged infrastructure. Many enterprise data centers have embraced a shared service management model to some degree, but converged infrastructure applies the shared service model more broadly to leverage modular system design and open standards, as well as to advance proven architectural frameworks.

The result is a realignment of traditional technology silos into adaptive pools that can be shared by any application, as well as optimized and managed as ongoing services. Under this model, resources are dynamically provisioned efficiently and automatically, gaining more business results productivity. This also helps rebalance IT spending away from a majority of spend on operations and more toward investments, innovations, and business improvements.

We're here to explore the benefits of a converged infrastructure approach and to better understand the challenges of attaining a transformed data center environment. We'll see how converged infrastructure provides a stepping stone to private cloud initiatives. But, as with any convergence, there are a lot of moving parts, including people, skills, processes, services, outsourcing options, and partner ecosystems.

We're here with two executives from Hewlett-Packard (HP) to delve deeply into converged infrastructure and to learn more about how to get started and deal with some of the complexity, as well as to know what to expect as payoff. Please join me in welcoming our guests today. We're here with Doug Oathout, Vice President, Converged Infrastructure at HP Storage, Servers, and Networking. Welcome to the show, Doug.

Doug Oathout: Thank you, Dana. Happy to be here.

Gardner: We're also here with John Bennett, Worldwide Director, Data Center Transformation Solutions at HP. Welcome back to BriefingsDirect, John.

John Bennett: Thank you very much, Dana. Glad to be with you again.

Gardner: Let me start with you, John. We're talking about some pretty big subjects. There's a lot to chew on here. Data-center transformation (DCT), I suppose, is the most general topic to approach and then to delve down more deeply. What do we mean nowadays by DCT? How does HP define it, and how does that relate to some of the business issues that IT folks are grappling with?

Not one-size-fits-all

Bennett: DCT helps customers implement a data center and infrastructure strategy that's aligned to their goals and objectives. The key here is that it's customer-driven, and it has to be built around the plans and directions of the targeted organization. This is clearly not a one-size-fits-all type of environment.

For many organizations, those strategies for infrastructure can include traditional shared infrastructure solutions or servers using virtualization and automation with shared storage environments. Increasingly, we've seen a natural evolution into a tighter integration of the capabilities and assets of the data center in the fabric infrastructure.

HP's Converged Infrastructure represents a pretty significant step forward in terms of benefits and capabilities for customers looking at having infrastructure strategy aligned to their future needs. The neat thing is that converged infrastructure can be the foundation for private cloud architectures.

Whichever combination of these fits a particular customer, there is the practical challenge of how to change from where you are today to having that implemented? That's what DCT is really about, because it helps implement these strategies through an integrated roadmap of data center projects by consolidation, energy efficiency initiatives, and technology initiatives, like virtualization and automation.

Each of these has its own short-term benefits and returns, but collectively the results get compounded over time, delivering the kind of benefits that we traditionally talk to with DCT. This is all in response to what's going on in customer environments.

I often think of many CIOs as being at the heart of a vise, where, on one side, they have the business pressures. They need to support growth. They need to do a faster job of creating acquisitions. They need to spend more on business projects and innovation. They need to exploit technology for business advantage. They need to reduce costs.

On the other side of the vise are the constraints that they have in the environment that get in the way of them successfully addressing the business needs -- legacy infrastructure and applications and antiquated methods of managing the infrastructure that make it difficult to be responsive to change, or people with the skills that won’t serve modern technology's needs or environments.

Facilities and data centers that were designed and built even five years ago might not have the energy and capacity to support current infrastructure environments. Then, of course, there's energy cost.

So, the CIO is at the heart of this vise. I like to think of DCT and converged infrastructure as kind of the yellow brick road and the Emerald City, where converged infrastructure is Emerald City. It's where you want to get to. DCT is the yellow brick road. It's how you get there, and they complement each other quite nicely.

Gardner: Doug, help me understand why this is important now. The way John is describing it, it seems that the same old approach just won’t hold up, that the trajectory of data centers is unsustainable, whether it's through cost, energy, or capacity issues.

It's not clear to me yet why this converged infrastructure is the right thing to do in totality. Are we talking about a rip-and-replace or are we talking about a gradual direction? Help me understand why, if you are going to move in that direction, you should start now.

Cutting innovation

Oathout: There is a major economic situation going on right now, Dana. As you said earlier, about two-thirds, if not 70 percent, of the operations budget is spent on maintaining the IT and the IT workload within the data center.

When you have a recession, like we just experienced, what happens is that 30 percent spent on innovation or new workload placement gets cut immediately to help manage the budget within an organization. Therefore, in the last 18 months, very little innovation and few new projects were taken on by IT to support new business growth.

Converged infrastructure is important now because we have customers who are starting to spend again and who are starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel. They want their IT environment to be more flexible in the future. So, they're looking at their server and storage upgrades, and how they can implement converged infrastructure, so that the new infrastructure is more flexible and can adapt more to the requirements of the business.

Let me give you an example. A server consolidation using virtualization and new server equipment will generally double or triple your capacity within your data center for the same footprint, just by getting the utilization of the servers up, better performance within the servers, and better capabilities within virtual environments. You can basically double or even triple the size of your capacity within your data center.

As you're going through your technology refresh now, coming out of the recession, you can start implementing better and faster IT equipment.



The same thing holds true for storage. Storage disk drives become twice as dense over a two or three year period. The performance of the drives gets better. So, for the same footprint in your data center you can actually fit twice as much storage.

As you're going through your technology refresh now, coming out of the recession, you can start implementing better and faster IT equipment. You can also use better and more efficient processes -- virtualization, automation, and management. When you put those pools of resources in place, you put them in a virtual environment so they can be shared among applications or can be transferred among applications when needed.

You are in the process now of creating pools of resources, versus dedicated silo resources, like you had prior to the recession, which couldn’t be reused for some of the application, and therefore you couldn’t support business growth.

The opportunity now is to break down those silos, give our customers the ability to share resources in the same footprint they have today, and actually become more efficient, so that when business changes or business needs change, they can adapt to the requirements of the business.

Gardner: So, clearly it's efficiency and better balance between supply and demand of resources, and then being able to apply those resources dynamically with a shared service model. All sounds very well and good. What are the hurdles? What's preventing people from getting to this vision?

Resilient and optimized


Oathout: The big hurdles to get over are the application managers themselves. Line of business comes to the applications team and say they need a SAP deployment or an Oracle deployment, and they tell them what hardware to put it on. In a converged infrastructure environment, you really don’t want to care about the infrastructure you are putting it on. What you want to care about is that it's resilient, it's optimized, and it's modular, so it can grow and shrink with the application's demand.

What you really have is a process change that's required between the IT application managers, the test and development people, and a team that actually runs the infrastructure. They need to talk more about standardization. They need to talk about how their IT comes together.

That's where the Data Center Transformation Workshop that John's team does helps. It gives you an architecture for future deployments, so that you have a converged infrastructure. You have pools of resources to put new applications down or revamp older applications onto a newer architecture, so it becomes more flexible.

You have to break down that silo or break down that fence between application deployments and what line of businesses are telling the application deployers and the people who run the infrastructure. Customers really do see that as a deployment barrier, but they're working through it, because there are significant benefits on the other side, just due to the fact that you increase agility, lower cost, and you have more money and more people to go do the innovation to support the workloads of future businesses.

Gardner: John, it sounds as if we're asking people, in a sense, to rethink things a little bit. Typically, as Doug pointed out, you start with the application set and you deploy it, and then you figure out the best way to operate that over time. We are trying to flip that on its head, thinking about what the operational outcome should be, and then go about applying those applications in the right fashion. Is that fair?

So whether it's 2010 or 2003 or 1992 or mini computers back in 1975, rethinking IT is a very healthy practice, but it always has to be aligned to the question of what the organization and business need.



Bennett: Well, I would suggest that good organizations are always rethinking IT. What are the organization's strategy, goals, and objectives? What is it going to take to realize those objectives? What capabilities do we need from IT in order to make those real? And then, how do we make them happen?

So whether it's 2010 or 2003 or 1992 or mini computers back in 1975, rethinking IT is a very healthy practice, but it always has to be aligned to the question of what the organization and business need.

We also have the question of how it can be exploited for benefit. This is where the partnership between the technology team and the business team comes into play. The technology team will have more insights into how it can be exploited, and the key thing for the business is to make sure they specify their needs and not specify the answer.

Doug characterized it very well, when he said the SAP team wants a new deployment and they tell you what to put it on. The moment you do that, you're losing any of the advantages of a converged infrastructure.

Gardner: As you point out, rethinking IT has been happening for quite some time. We really don't have the luxury of standing still for very long in this industry. On the other side of the equation, you need to have a business or financial rationale to create that change in addition to having the vision of where you would like to go.

So, is there a business case, a rationale, a economic formula of some sort that HP is reflecting about -- how to go to those people who control the purse strings in order to move in this direction of a converged infrastructure?

Business plan in play

Bennett: There clearly is a business plan in play here. A lot of the benefits of this are in the nature of cost savings -- the consolidation, modernization, and virtualization that Doug spoke to -- the savings from energy related projects and investments with Data Center Smart Grid, for example. All are easily quantifiable.

Other benefits have financial benefits too. There's economic return to the organization from being able to roll out a new business service more quickly. There's an economic return to the business from being able to provision more resources when they are needed based on demand, so that demand doesn't disappear. There's a competitive business benefit, which is financial in nature, in being able to respond to competitive threats more quickly.

The business case for transformation and the business case for a converged infrastructure should be constructed, and it's the best way to get the buy in from senior executives.

Technologists playing with toys is not a compelling argument for investment by a business. Technologists making significant investments to make sure that IT is aligned to the needs of the business and having the business case for it is a great way to get approval to go ahead.

Gardner: Doug, when we think about a shared services model and a natural progression toward more of a converged infrastructure that borrows from that shared services mentality, how do we move into this as a manageable progression? How do we avoid that thinking about a rip and replace or a massive disruption or throwing of a switch? How is this applied in terms of a managed process or a progression or evolution?

It also has a very quick payback, because basically you're getting back 30 percent of your disk, which was over-provisioned, and now can be used.



Oathout: The way you go back and look at your infrastructure is very important, Dana. Let's just take the storage environment for a moment. You have a number of storage environments. They could either be direct-attached storage (DAS), network-attached storage (NAS), or storage area networks (SANs).

All these environments have performance application service-level agreements (SLAs), associated with them. If you look at the different types of storage environments, there are different technologies that virtualize those today. These allow you to take large blocks of the storage and put them behind a virtual SAN or behind a virtualized environment, which allows you to share those resources amongst multiple server environments.

For example, we have a SAN Virtual Services Platform from HP, in which you can take heterogeneous storage, put it behind this virtual SAN technology, and actually get 30 percent of the capacity back, because all the over-provisioned disks now become available for all those applications sitting on the other side of the virtual SAN. We have a very similar technology from our LeftHand team, with our P4000, it does the same thing for direct-attached storage.

Using technologies like those to grab the excess capacity you have today by doing storage virtualization is very easy to do. It also has a very quick payback, because basically you're getting back 30 percent of your disk, which was over-provisioned, and now can be used. A lot of our customers don't have to buy disks for two to three months, and then when they do buy disk, they can actually put it behind the SAN environment and multiple applications can use it and share it.


For more information on HP's Virtual Services, please go to: www.hp.com/go/virtualization and www.hp.com/go/services


Server consolidation


On the server side of things, server consolidation is very prevalent today, because the new servers are faster than the old. They have more memory capacity. They have virtual I/O built into them. So, it's very simple for you to consolidate servers, and when you are consolidating you use virtual I/O environment or FlexFabric environment. You then have the capability to dial up and dial down the I/O capacity of the server to meet the demand of the virtual machines running on it.

There is the server consolidation with virtualization that everybody knows, but then there is also the big benefit of storage virtualization and the fabric virtualization that can go on. Those are the three pieces. Once you get them in place, you can then start doing the automation, management, and the provisioning of workloads that John talked about much faster.

It's basically virtualizing that whole environment with resiliency and everything built into our ProLiant boxes and high availability business critical system boxes. You get all the capabilities and all the resiliency you need in them, and then you put virtualization on top of the storage networking and servers, and you really get the pool of resources that you can dynamically allocate.

Those three projects are the ones that give you that base from which you can then springboard your projects or your new applications.

Gardner: We've heard so much in the last year or two about cloud computing and private clouds. I think there is some confusion about private cloud. What we are talking about in terms of these converged infrastructures, the virtualization of various major aspects of your infrastructure, and then getting them to work in some harmony as a fabric. Are we talking about the same thing? Is cloud computing and converged infrastructure essentially the same? What is the relationship?

Converged infrastructure can be for public cloud, private cloud, or for a web workload or an high-performance computing (HPC) workload or an SAP workload. It doesn't really matter.



Oathout: A cloud-computing environment is really an application-rich environment that allows you to bring more users on quickly and expand your capabilities and shrink your capabilities as you need them.

Converged infrastructure can be for public cloud, private cloud, or for a web workload or an high-performance computing (HPC) workload or an SAP workload. It doesn't really matter. A converged infrastructure is the optimal deployment of IT to support any kind of application, because it's modular in nature.

It has the flexibility to have more storage, more memory, less CPUs or more CPUs, less storage, or less memory, but it's all modular, so you can put the pieces together as you need them. So, it is a base support for either a cloud environment or a traditional IT environment. It really doesn't matter. It's designed to support both.

A private cloud is the IT department saying, "I'm now going to create a service catalog for my lines of business to develop upfront." You're getting software as a service (SaaS) now sitting on top of either a converged infrastructure or legacy infrastructure. A converged infrastructure is a lot easy to put SaaS on. But, you make that service catalog available to line of businesses, so they can turn on applications as they need them, very quickly.

Optimizing over time

Then, you can put more users on an enterprise resource planning (ERP) application, an online application, or a Web 2.0 application. IT is there as a support service now, setting that up, taking it down, and optimizing it over time, depending on the business needs.

So, private cloud is kind of that SaaS that sits on either a converged infrastructure or a legacy infrastructure or uniquely designed infrastructures that you get from some of the public cloud providers. Converged infrastructure is the optimal way to develop and deploy that in a standard data-center environment, and it's in support of a private cloud.

Gardner: John Bennett, when we think about that earlier imperative around flipping the balance of spending on operations into spending on innovation, when we think about moving toward a private cloud or cloud environment, and we charge people based on their usage, do they factor together? I'm trying to understand how we can both reconcile moving toward cloud and fabric and "blank as a service," and, at the same time, reduce those costs, so that we can get that business benefit and innovation engine roaring?

Bennett: That's a very interesting question. For an organization to make good business decisions, they need to have a very good understanding, not only of the benefits, which I talked about earlier, but of the costs. In this environment you get line of sight into the cost infrastructure, so you know what it costs you to provide services.

The businesses, in turn, know what it costs to take an offering to market, a cost based on reality and not based on just spread out mayonnaise models of financing. It lets them really understand the business and whether or not it's an investment they should make. There are clearly benefits on that side, if you can go that far. The benefit of moving to that services orientation is that it gives you clear insight into the cost structures.

It allowed a smaller number of people to manage the environment, so that the rest of their IT team could work on improving service levels for the store and how to improve getting new applications to the new environment.



Gardner: I'm always an advocate of showing rather than telling. I hope we have some examples to illustrate how some of your clients have undertaken a converged infrastructure initiative, and what some of the outcomes were. Does either of you have any examples today?

Oathout: There is a retailer we worked with called Stein Mart. They had an inflexible infrastructure to run nearly 300 stores in the Americas, and they were struggling to bring new applications on line quickly enough to support the demands of the store environment.

They bought into the converged infrastructure story. They bought into our BladeSystem Matrix product, which is the combination of storage, server, flexible network, software, and services.

We enabled them to run this BladeSystem Matrix environment. It allowed them to spin up applications in hours instead of days. It allowed a smaller number of people to manage the environment, so that the rest of their IT team could work on improving service levels for the store and how to improve getting new applications to the new environment.

Increased productivity

S
tein Mart saw a significant cost reduction, because of the floor space they had in their data center. They saw a significant increase in productivity from their staff. They saw a 2x increase in response time for calls from the stores, and they saw a significant increase in the time to market for new applications. Instead of days, they were taking hours to set up new applications.

The second customer is the Dallas Cowboys. They built a new football stadium in the Dallas area. It's a $1.4 billion investment. In the bottom of the thing is their data center. They run 30 different businesses out of the data center in the Dallas Cowboys stadium.

They have built it on a virtual environment. They have BladeSystems. They have the FlexFabric built into the environment. They went from over 500 servers down to 16 blades, with virtual machines running on them for the point of sale environment within the stadium. It drove a smaller footprint, but also the dynamics in the server and storage environment, so they can bring on new applications for the 30 businesses very quickly.

They changed their infrastructure to support their environment. That's an evolution, versus a Stein Mart, which did a rip and replace to get better productivity to support their business.

Gardner: Any other examples and perhaps ways to demonstrate what HP can bring to this very complex equation?

The infrastructure was there to set up their operating environment on, so that they could run their business relatively quickly.



Oathout: One other example we have is the airport in Dubai, which was a new business, one of the fastest growing airports in the world. They wanted to set up a shared-service environment for their retailers and other businesses around the airport. So, they actually set up a BladeSystem Matrix environment to run their video surveillance, their infrastructure, baggage handling, and all that.

They set up another environment, which allowed their retailers, passport personnel, and other businesses on site to use their shared service environment to really a full service to their client base inside the airport.

So, when a new business, a new government, or a new agency had to come into the airport, they didn’t have to worry about bringing infrastructure with them. The infrastructure was there to set up their operating environment on, so that they could run their business relatively quickly.

Very productive

All three examples: Stein Mart, Cowboys, and Dubai airport, are very productive in how they bring applications online, very reactive to the lines of businesses they are supporting. That's what a converged infrastructure really delivers, besides the lower economic cost that John and I have talked about. It's that efficiency to bring new opportunities to the lines of businesses, accelerate business growth, or increase customer satisfaction.

Gardner: I recall that HP announced converged infrastructure in November 2009, and this is something that I think pulls together a lot of aspects of what HP had been doing for some time. It's a complex process involving people, skills, and different product sets, different professional services, capabilities, and so forth. What makes HP different in terms of how they are accomplishing this notion of DCT, John?

Bennett: What makes us different is that, first of all, we don’t believe one size fits all. We believe that we need to do a good job working with our customers in understanding their strategies and goals and developing an infrastructure strategy that is aligned to that.

We also don’t believe that these infrastructure strategies for the future should have at their core monolithic computing solutions from the past. We also have a very flexible approach in our projects, in that we try to wrap the services we have available around the capabilities of the customer, rather than making them pay to have HP do everything.

Customers who have a great deal of staff, skills, and capabilities with tools . . . will be quite capable of undertaking these efforts on their own.



Customers who have a great deal of staff, skills, and capabilities with tools -- like the Converged Infrastructure Maturity Model and the assessment that goes with that -- will be quite capable of undertaking these efforts on their own.

We try to offer a great deal of flexibility in how we work with customers, and also in how these are implemented. Customers can do these in a traditional customer-owned data-center environment, in an HP hosted environment, or even outsource it to HP. So, there's incredible flexibility based around the customers' needs and interests.

Gardner: You mentioned the maturity model. Is that a potential stepping stone of how to get started on some of these initiatives? Where could some of the folks who are contemplating their next moves architecturally, in terms of transforming their data centers, go to start? How do they get more information?

Oathout: There are two ways to get started. They can contact one of HP’s business partners. Our business partners are enabled to do our Converged Infrastructure Maturity Model. Or, you can come to HP.com/go/ci, and it will take you to the landing page for a converged infrastructure. A client or a customer could click on the Maturity Model, find out about what it can do for them, and then find a practitioner from HP that can come help them, through the Maturity Model, to show them the roadmap or the yellow brick road that John talked about to help them get to converged infrastructure.

Bennett: If the customer is interested in understanding all the things that HP might be able to do with them, they can engage with HP in a Data Center Transformation Experience Workshop, Doug mentioned the CI landing page. They can also go to www.hp.com/go/dct to find out more about that. That will help them take a broader look at the IT infrastructure and facilities and environment, and look at it from a transformational perspective.

Gardner: Focusing on the future, as we look to close up, this strikes me as something that's not just a flash in the pan or a one- or two-year trend. This seems to me a long-term trajectory. This is pretty much an inevitable way in which data centers are going to develop, that is to say converged, fabric, service-oriented, with the efficiency of dynamic provisioning involved. Any thoughts about where this direction is going to take us, and do you agree that this is essentially inevitable?

Economies of scale

Oathout: It is inevitable, just because of the economies of scale, Dana. Truly, when you start bringing a storage and server and networking platforms together through a flexible fabric, the economies of scale of a shared resources and open systems is going to drive down the cost of acquiring IT. Then, with the software and the services capabilities that companies bring to market, they're going to bring the efficiencies along with them.

So, it is inevitable, starting with the simplest of workloads, moving to some of the hardest of workloads, that you are going to have a converged infrastructure. You are going to have application as a service, whether it's internal or external from a cloud provider, just because the economies of scale are there, and the ability to deploy the stuff is so simple once you get it set up that the efficiencies are also there besides the economies of purchase.

Gardner: Any last thoughts John in terms of the future direction and how long of a trend we are talking about here?

Bennett: How long a term is always difficult to say. One of the exciting things about IT in general is that we see this wonderful yin and yang, this give and take between technology advancements and customer expectations and uses. Customers challenge us to step forward to meet tomorrow's problems. Technology evolves, and we challenge customers to take advantage of it for a business benefit.

That's going to continue, as Doug highlighted, the economic value that comes from this convergence of infrastructure, and the economies of scale are very compelling, but I'm not going to predict how long it's going to last.

Gardner: Well, we'll certainly find out, won't we? It's been very good speaking with you. We've been talking about improved data center productivity through a progression to converged infrastructure.

We've been joined by two executives from HP. Doug Oathout is the Vice President of Converged Infrastructure at HP Storage, Servers, and Networking. Thanks so much, Doug.

Oathout: Thank you Dana.

Gardner: Also John Bennett, Worldwide Director, Data Center Transformation Solutions at HP. Thanks again, John.

Bennett: And thank you, Dana, and thank you, Doug.

Gardner: And, thank you all for listening. This is Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions. You've been listening to a sponsored BriefingsDirect podcast. Thanks for listening and come back next time.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Download the transcript. Learn more. Sponsor: Hewlett-Packard.

For more information on virtualization and how it provides a foundation for Private Cloud, plan to attend the HP Cloud Virtual Conference taking place in March. To register for this event, go to:
Asia, Pacific, Japan - March 2
Europe Middle East and Africa - March 3
Americas - March 4

Transcript of a sponsored BriefingsDirect podcast on achieving cost control and increased utilization through coordinated design, open standards and application-specific infrastructure. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2010. All rights reserved.

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Tuesday, September 15, 2009

Economic and Climate Imperatives Combine to Elevate Green IT as Cost-Productive Priority

Transcript of a sponsored BriefingsDirect podcast on making progress toward Green IT and on what companies can do to improve energy efficiency, reduce carbon footprints and save money.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Download the transcript. Learn more. Sponsor: Hewlett-Packard.

Dana Gardner: Hi, this is Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions, and you’re listening to BriefingsDirect.

Today, we present a sponsored podcast discussion on Green IT and the many ways to help reduce energy use, stem carbon dioxide creation, and reduce total IT costs -- all at the same time. We're also focusing on how IT can be a benefit to a whole business or corporate-level look at energy use.

We'll look at how current IT planners should view energy concerns, some common approaches to help conserve energy, and at how IT suppliers themselves can make "green" a priority in their new systems and solutions.

[UPDATE: HP named "most green" IT vendor by Newsweek.]

Here to help us better understand the Green IT issues, technologies, and practices impacting today's enterprise IT installations and the larger businesses they support, we're joined by five executives from HP: Christine Reischl, general manager of HP's Industry Standard Servers. Welcome, Christine.

Christine Reischl: Welcome to you.

Gardner: We're also joined by Paul Miller, vice president of Enterprise Servers and Storage Marketing at HP. Hello, Paul.

Paul Miller: Well, thank you.

Gardner: And Michelle Weiss, vice president of marketing for HP's Technology Services. Welcome Michelle.

Michelle Weiss: Hello.

Gardner: Also Jeff Wacker, an EDS Fellow. Welcome, Jeff.

Jeff Wacker: Thank you. Glad to be here.

Gardner: Lastly, Doug Oathout, vice president of Green IT for HP's Enterprise Servers and Storage. Welcome Doug.

Doug Oathout: Good afternoon. Thank you.

Gardner: Doug, let's start with you. Tell us a little bit about what the major concerns are for those who are creating and consuming IT and apparently trying to reduce the amount of energy that they're consuming as well.

Cost of energy

Oathout: The major issue that customers are wrestling with is the current cost of energy. The current cost of energy continues to rise. The amount of energy used by IT is not going down. It continues to rise. So, it's becoming a larger portion of their budget. They're very concerned with managing their expense and, therefore, want to look at energy use and how they can reduce it, not only from a data center perspective, but also from consumption of the monitors, printers, and desktop PCs as well. So, the first major concern is the cost of energy to run IT.

The second one they run into is that they want to extend the life of their data center. They don't want to have to spend $10 million, $50 million, or $100 million to build another data center in this economic environment. They want to extend the life of their data center. So, they want to know anything possible, from best practices to new equipment to new cooling designs, to help them extend the life of the data center.

Lastly, they're concerned with regulations coming in the marketplace. A number of countries already have a demand to reduce power consumption through most of their major companies. We have a European Code of Conduct, that's optional for data centers, and then the U.S. has regulations now in front of Congress to start a cap-and-trade system.

As regulations get passed around the world, clients and customers are going to have to react to them, and they're going to have to know how much energy they're using, as well as their carbon footprint, so they can act upon it to meet the regulatory environment.

Gardner: So, Doug, this is by no means just a "nice to have," this is pretty much a "must-do."

Oathout: This is a must-do. The business environment is saying, "You've got to reduce cost," and then the government is going to come in and say, "You're going to have to reduce your energy." So, this is a must-do.

Gardner: The role of IT is I suppose, fairly prominent, and not just a rounding error.

Oathout: No, it's a big opportunity for the clients, because they can use IT to fix their inefficient processes or to fix how things are running. They can use IT to put intelligence behind some of their processes to reduce the amount of energy and carbon they produce.

Gardner: That means that IT perhaps is more of a solution to the general energy problems than simply the amount of energy that it consumes as a department?

Backbone of digitization

Oathout: It's exactly that. IT can multiply the effects of intelligence being built into the system. IT is the backbone of digitization of information, which allows smart business people to make good, sound decisions.

Gardner: Let's go to Paul Miller now. What are some common issues that you're seeing among the users of your services and solutions at HP? What's the common thought around some of your infrastructure efficiency demands?

Miller: One of the key issues is who owns the problem of energy within the business and within the data center. IT clearly has a role. The CFO has a role. The data center facilities manager has a role. One of the key issues, when we go into a customer, is determining who owns the problem and who owns the decision to change the problem?

The other key element, and we talk about this, is that you can't manage what you can't see. There are very limited tools today to understand where energy is being used, how efficient systems are, and how making changes in your data center can help the end customer.

That's where HP has assembled a set of tools and services that can come in and help customers instrument their data centers. Our expertise in knowing where and how changes to different equipment, different software models, and different service models can drive a significant impact to the amount of energy that customers are using and also help them grow their capacity at the same time.

We recently introduced a product called our Environmental Edge, which instruments an entire data center from those to services to help customers deploy and build brand new data centers.

Technologies like our containers, which we call our Performance-Optimized Data Center (POD), have been designed specifically to enable customers to achieve the highest power utilization and lowest cost for building out a data center. Those are some of the options that we can bring to a customer that has infrastructure energy issues.

Gardner: When we factor in the cost of energy, it seems that the return on investment (ROI) equation moves quite a bit closer to a short-term calculation. Is there some sort of an energy arithmetic that you're seeing among folks, as they examine their spending?

Everyone needs rapid ROI

Miller: In today's economy, everyone needs an ROI that's as quick as possible. It's gone from 12 months down to 6 months. With our new ProLiant G6 servers, the cost and energy savings alone is so significant, when you tie in technologies like virtualization and the power and performance we have, we're seeing up to three months ROI over older servers by companies being able to save on energy plus software costs. It's just not focusing on the energy as energy's sake, but also looking at the efficiencies of the rest of the data center that we take into account.

Gardner: Does the general movement towards conservation across the corporation require a bit of an organizational shift? Do the folks in IT now need to relate to other groups in the organization that they perhaps didn't have to before?

Miller: Absolutely. As I mentioned earlier, typically, the energy costs come at an aggregate level of facilities organizations, and being able to communicate what changes we can make from an IT standpoint into those organizations is critical. It goes all the way up to energy utilization being a corporate issue in helping build the corporate brand by implementing technologies that help a corporation put on a green set of initiatives and help build the entire brand for the company.

Gardner: Let's go next to Christine Reischl. Christine, with millions literally of servers pouring off of assembly lines, what do you do in terms of bringing energy efficiency into the design? Is there a great deal being done across the life cycle of the products themselves?

Reischl: Yes. Energy efficiency is one of our critical design objectives for our product, and we have been innovating in power cooling and software for years now. We have quite a significant amount of HP Labs activity going on with process applications, and so forth. Our customers are benefiting from that hardware right now.

As an example, the G6 servers, the new generation of our x86 servers, which use 50 percent less power, are 50 percent more energy efficient and have 50 percent less power utilization than servers sold several years ago. In addition to that, there is a claiming capacity possibility, as well as extending the life of the data center.

How did we do that for our G6 servers? It was really coming with innovation. The first one, as an example, involves the Sea of Sensors, which are 32 smart thermal sensors across our servers that constantly optimize the energy use, the fan speed, and the acoustics.

Another example is the Dynamic Power Capping, where we have a safe way of limiting the power

Energy efficiency is one of our critical design objectives for our product, and we have been innovating in power cooling and software for years now

draw or power consumption without impacting performance, so that customers can really fill up their racks and up to triple their service in the data center.

Another example is the common power supply, which allows the power supply to run at efficiency levels of 92 percent and above, which again helps with the power consumption tremendously. Those are the examples of our G6, a broad new generation of x86 servers which came out end of March and is here, filling out the portfolio.

At the same time, we also have announced just recently a new product family, the SL product family, which allows for specific energy savings of 30 percent for a current generation of products. This is specifically, from a design objective, targeting a low-Watt environment per server.

Gardner: As we pointed out earlier, this whole ROI equation is so important, assuming that we're only getting a certain distance into what's potentially possible at energy savings. How far into this potential efficiency drive do you think we are?

Continuous innovation

Reischl: Well, we have been investing in that area for several years now. We will have an energy power cooling roadmap and we will continuously launch innovation as we go along. We also have an overall environment around power and cooling, which we call the Thermal Logic environment. Under this umbrella, we are not only innovating on the hardware side, but on the software side as well, to ensure that we can benefit on both sides for our customers.

In addition to that, HP ProCurve, for example, has switches that now use 40 percent less energy than industry average network switches. We also have our StorageWorks Enterprise Virtual Array, which reduces the cost of power and cooling by 50 percent using thin provisioning and larger capacity disks.

So, not only are we talking about servers, but we are also talking about storage and ProCurve

That is clearly a big benefit for winning deals and helping our customer to operate efficiency.

switches in this context. The greater HP environment around innovation is on those greater types of divisions and engagements.

Gardner: I've received questions about Energy Star ratings and what that means. Are there certain incentives in terms of whether you adopt an Energy Star-rated device or not, how does that work?

Reischl: The high-volume products or our G6 servers have the Energy Star rating. Clearly, what it documents and demonstrates is that we are the only ones in the industry who are able to certify for Energy Star, which again speaks to the fact of how power- and cooling-efficient our servers are. That is clearly a big benefit for winning deals and helping our customer to operate efficiency.

Gardner: Thank you so much. Michelle Weiss, when it comes to people and process, when we look at solutions level approaches to IT and overall energy conservation, what is HP doing? What are some of the general solution approaches to helping your customers get greener?

Weiss: Well, Dana, for us it's pretty simple, because it's really all about helping clients use their resources -- using what you've got more efficiently and effectively.

You can start with those infrastructure resources. We just heard Christine speak to those and Paul as well. We can help clients with things like consolidation, whether simple consolidation or all the way up to a big data-center consolidation, like HP did, going from 85 data centers down to 6 locations.

We could help with virtualization. We could also help with networking, a more efficient network design, or more efficient installation. Christine spoke about storage. We could certainly go to and help people profile their data to see if there is wasted space or if the data needs to be tiered or consolidated.

Obviously, we're talking about energy and energy-efficiency analysis. Paul was talking about the facilities and the IT person coming together and having a discussion.

Hands-on assessment

We can go in and do a hands-on assessment of the actual power use in the data center and provide people with a report that says, "Here's what you're using and here's our recommendation." We can go from a very low cost recommendation, like, "You should shut down an air conditioner," all the way up to a very extensive recommendation.

Let me talk for just a second about the human resources, because you spoke about that, and I think it's an often-overlooked area about getting more efficiency out of our human resources.

We have a lot of HP education, very much geared for IT personnel around getting them more capable and effective around technology areas like virtualization. But, we also have a lot of capability to help people with training in the use of things like videoconferencing with Halo technology, etc. So, it's all of those things together, using those resources more efficiently.

Gardner: Now, there is more than energy when it comes to being green. There is reducing

. . . by 2010, HP will have recycled over two billion pounds of product.

waste, recycling, and examining the lifecycle of a device from cradle to grave, and then also being mindful of how to properly dispose of those parts that can't be recycled. Tell us about the solutions are for how equipment gets sunset.

Weiss: This is a really interesting area. I don't know if you know this, Dana, but by 2010, HP will have recycled over two billion pounds of product. For someone that's always trying to lose weight, I think about that -- my God, that's a lot of product.

We've won a lot of recycling awards throughout the U.S. and abroad. We we’re the first computer company to actually have a recycling plant -- it's actually located near to me -- which we opened about a dozen years ago. So, we do a lot of that.

We also provide other options for disposal, other options to purchase recycled or refurbished products for our customers, and we also have HP Financial Services that come in and ensure that IT equipment that has passed its prime can actually be disposed of in a way that will help meet local environmental laws. We have a lot of work on asset recovery and a lot of work on that end stage of the lifecycle.

Gardner: Is there a great deal of education that needs to take place with IT? Are IT folks generally already thinking about life cycle and recycling, or is this an educational issue as well?

Thinking of a lifecycle

Weiss: It's both. IT tends to think in terms of a lifecycle. If you think about ITIL and all of the processes and procedures most IT people follow, they tend to be more process oriented than most groups. But, there is even more understanding now about that latter stage of the lifecycle and not just in terms of disposing of equipment.

The other area that people are really thinking about now is data -- what do you do at the end of the lifecycle of data? How do you keep the data around that you need to, and what do you do about data that you need to archive and maybe put on less energy-consuming devices? That's a very big area.

Gardner: Having high redundancy of data, of course, is basically wasted cycles, wasted electrons, and wasted money.

Weiss: Exactly. That footprint is very large when you really think about that entire supply chain of energy.

Gardner: Thanks so much. Let's go over to Jeff Wacker at EDS, an HP company. As a fellow there at EDS, Jeff, tell us a bit about what EDS, as a very large global hosting organization, is doing in regard to going green.

Wacker: We're a services play. We look for total solutions, as opposed to spot solutions, as we approach the entire ecology, energy, and efficiency triumvirate. It's all three of those things in one. It's not just energy. It's all three.

My colleagues have talked very eloquently about data centers and hardware. I'll mention a little more on data centers. One of the things I wanted to bring up was that we look from the origination all the way through the delivery of the data in a business process. Not only do we do the data centers, and run servers, storage, and communications, but we also run applications.

You may not have heard of green applications, but, indeed, applications are also high on the order of whether they are green or not. First of all, it means reconciling an application's portfolio, so that you're not running three applications in three different places. That will run three different server platforms and therefore will require more energy.

It's being able to understand the inefficiencies with which we've coded much of our application services in the past, and understanding that there are much more efficient ways to use the emerging technologies and the emerging servers than we've ever used before. So, we have a very high focus on building green applications and reconciling existing portfolios of applications into green portfolios.

How you use IT

Moving onto the business processes, the best data delivered into the worst process will not improve that process at all. It will just have extended it. Business process outsourcing, business process consulting, and understanding how you use IT in the business is continuing to have a very large impact on environmental and green.

Gardner: Now, given that you have high stakes in cutting your cost and reducing redundancy and waste, I'd think this goes right to your bottom line as an outsourcer. What metrics of success do you use, how do you measure, and how do you know when you're doing the right things?

Wacker: It's a good question. There are a lot of metrics out there, and a lot of them were built with the efficiency of buildings in mind, and some, directly with data centers in mind. The defense council on integration and efficiency has created a data-center infrastructure efficiency (DCIE). There is a power-usage effectiveness (PUE), or essentially an inverse of one over the other. What they do is ask, "How many Watts does it take for you to run the infrastructure of the data center in order to drive a watt of power at a server?"

These are traditional metrics. Quite frankly, right now we, as well as others in the industry, are looking at new metrics, because it's both sides of the equation. You want an efficient data center. You want efficient use of the watts that are going into the servers. So, you now have to consider how many partitions am I running, how smart are the power supplies and the fans on these servers, everything that's been talked about before.

Moving into the data center, we're looking at capabilities that are using, for example, air

. . . if you know where you're getting your IT from, you can ask that supplier how green is your IT, and hold that supplier to a high standard of green IT.

handling in the proper locations that allow you not to use compression. Anybody who runs their air conditioner during the summer knows that a lot of their electricity charges are running that compressor, which is actually creating the cooling capability for their house.

If we are locating some of our data centers in locations where the air is of a certain temperature that allows us to run data centers without compression 97 or 98 percent of the year, you can imagine that we have created quite a bit of savings for us.

Gardner: That's true, of course, for your data centers. Other organizations that are looking at how to place their data centers, I suppose, have more sourcing options. We've heard a lot about cloud computing recently. How impactful is this long-term decision about how many data centers? I suppose also at the architectural level of what sort of applications and architectures you want to support, is this top of mind for all the folks you're dealing with?

Wacker: Well, it is becoming top of mind, and you've already identified the major culprit in this. That is that the cost of energy is going to continue to accelerate, and to be higher and higher, and therefore a major component of your cost structure in running IT. So yes, everybody is looking at that.

One of the things about what has been called cloud or Adaptive Infrastructure is that you've got to look at it from two sides. One, if you know where you're getting your IT from, you can ask that supplier how green is your IT, and hold that supplier to a high standard of green IT. That's the type of a standard that HP seeks to meet at all times.

But, not everybody who is going to be running computing infrastructure within the cloud is going to meet that. So, one of the big challenges of cloud computing is how green are they. You, as a corporation, have to identify all of your green for cap-and-trade or for the regulations. You're going to have to know that. So there are going to be some interesting disclosures that will be coming up as we move down the road.

A two-sided sword

On the other hand, cloud is, by its definition, moving a lot of processes into a very few number of boxes -- ultra virtualization, ultra flexibility. So it's a two-sided sword and both sides have to be looked at. One, is for you to be able to get the benefits of the cloud, but the other one is to make sure that the cost of the cloud, both in terms of capabilities as well as the environment, are in your mindset as you contract.

Gardner: Unfortunately, we're asking even more of our beleaguered IT executives and strategists. They're being asked to do more for less now in terms of productivity, but we're going to be asking them to do less in terms of their energy use, and then thinking outside the box when it comes to the sourcing options and how to factor the green across an ecology of providers.

I'd like to take the question to both Paul and Michelle. How do these IT strategists get a handle on this? What are some first steps for them?

Weiss: Let me start and then I can turn it over to Paul. One of the really clear things we have seen in our experience is that taking a set of uncoordinated approaches to this whole area just doesn't work. You really are better off if you have a top-down view of what you're trying to do. So, always understand your strategy and build the plan around that.

Certainly, we've got services both from our Technology Services organization and from Jeff in

We can help make that case in business language, because this is all about business technology.

EDS about helping people make the case. As Paul was talking earlier today, many people are actually making the case to their CFO. It's no longer always a CIO concern.

We can help make that case in business language, because this is all about business technology. It's all about driving business outcomes. We can help make that case in plain business terms, either around energy efficiency that you can do, around adopting, for example, the G6 servers, or around a virtualization project. We can do that in business language.

Gardner: Paul, what sort of approaches won't work? The first thing that comes to my mind is doing nothing. It sounds like proactive is the message of the day.

Miller: Yeah, two things ... One is doing nothing. The other is jumping at a lot of claims out there. There are multiple claims out there. Every time I see a press release or I see an advertisement, it has a claim on energy efficiency. As Jeff pointed out, you need to have an approach on this that looks at it from a data center, from a PUE, standpoint, and just not jump on the claim of the day.

The other element is that the claim of the day is done a lot around a specific application or a specific setup that may not be appropriate for your business. So, take time to research. Look for companies like HP that have power calculators that you can plug your own unique configurations into, but then go beyond that.

Coordinated approach

One of the other things, and this goes to what Michelle was talking about, is a coordinated approach. A coordinated approach is not just about buying energy efficient equipment. It's about managing them very effectively.

We have our power capping tool, which enables you to set specific power limits within the data center, so that you can guarantee an outcome for your energy, an outcome for your power, an outcome for your performance that you're going to have from a service-level agreement (SLA). Building intelligence into them is critical for the long-term success and long-term savings of power for your environment.

Gardner: A last set of questions. Doug, at this point, what should we expect in the future? Are we undertaking a journey and we're only in the very first steps, now that energy and the environment have become so prominent?

Oathout: Dana, this is an ongoing process. This process of energy efficiency never ends. As Michelle and Paul pointed out, once you undertake a simple assessment of figuring out how much energy you're consuming, where it’s being consumed, then you develop a roadmap for virtualization, you develop a roadmap for consolidation, you develop a roadmap for application efficiency, then you start all over again.

It's an ongoing, continuous process improvement that you do every day, every week, every month. It's a journey that bears fruit. It can be a small project or it can be a large project, but the key is to have a snapshot of where you are today and then measure yourself on an ongoing basis on your progression.

The servers are more efficient than they were three years ago. Our storage is more efficient than

It's an ongoing, continuous process improvement that you do every day, every week, every month. It's a journey that bears fruit.

it was three years ago. Our networking is more efficient. There are all different kinds of projects based on technology, but there is also technology in software and services that can help you gain even more efficiencies. This is the beginning of a never-ending process, but it does bear fruit on an ongoing basis.

Gardner: I have to imagine that a lot of people feel pretty strongly about this, and the community approach could be quite powerful. Do we have avenues for how folks in the field who might have some ideas themselves about process, technology, and perhaps even other aspects of this equation can contribute?

Oathout: We have both an internal and an external green website that is continually taking questions and being monitored for ideas. Our internal sales team can go through our green website, and our external clients and consultants can take advantage of HP's knowledge, as well, through our external green website.

Gardner: Well, I'm afraid we're about out of time. We've been discussing green IT and the many ways that IT can help reduce energy and play a larger role in the "greenification" of enterprises at large.

We've been joined by a panel of five executives from HP. We've been joined by Christine Reischl, general manager of HP's Industry Standard Servers. Thank you, Christine.

Reischl: Thank you.

Gardner: Paul Miller, vice president of Enterprise Servers and Storage Marketing at HP. Thank you, Paul.

Miller: Thank you, Dana.

Gardner: Michelle Weiss, vice president of marketing for HP's Technology Services.

Weiss: It's been a pleasure.

Gardner: Jeff Wacker, an EDS Fellow. Thank you, Jeff.

Wacker: Thank you, Dana.

Gardner: And Doug Oathout, vice president of Green IT for HP's Enterprise Servers and Storage.

Oathout: Thank you, Dana.

Gardner: This is Dana Gardner. You have been listening to a sponsored BriefingsDirect podcast. Thanks for joining and come back next time.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Download the transcript. Learn more. Sponsor: Hewlett-Packard.

Transcript of a sponsored BriefingsDirect podcast on making progress toward Green IT and on what companies can do to improve energy efficiency, reduce carbon footprints and save money. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2009. All rights reserved.