Dataquest Insight: Server Virtualization and IT Operations Management Will Boost End-to-End Green Branding and Positioning in EMEA

Together with IT operations management (ITOM) software, virtualization is supporting the objectives of reducing carbon footprint and reducing energy consumption. Leveraging virtualization as a way to implement environmental life cycle strategies will assist IT software vendors to position technology innovation as a green product differentiator.

By 2013, the total virtualization market in Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) will be worth €834.8 million, with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) from 2008 through 2013 of 16.5%. Virtualization is the first and most significant step on the road to cost savings and building an organization that abides by a green IT ethos.

• The EMEA server virtualization infrastructure, server virtualization management and hosted virtual desktop (HVD) software market is forecast to grow to €834.8 million by 2013.
• Virtualization can increase server utilization and decrease overall energy costs by moving server workloads onto virtualized environments, but it is only one step (albeit a very important one) in building a green IT message.

• The adoption of virtualized platforms has, in many ways, advanced among European companies. In particular, the U.K., Germany and France have the biggest markets in terms of adoption. Vendors must tailor green marketing messages to suit these markets.
• ITOM vendors must build return on investment (ROI) models to further their customers' understanding of the financial impact of implementing virtualized environments. Vendors can help in modeling data and assisting organizations to develop best practices that show how an organization can lower its power costs and lessen its carbon footprint by virtualizing infrastructure as compared with traditional server environments.
• ITOM software vendors should position their management tools to help IT organizations manage the virtualized IT estate and assist IT organizations track and assert their green IT credentials as part of a green dashboard.

Customers that have embarked on a virtualization program have chosen to focus only on key IT metrics, such as decreasing physical server count and reducing the associated operational costs. Even those that conducted ROI studies prior to initiating such a program may have failed to capture the consequent benefits of a reduction in power cost and a lowering of carbon footprint.

Vendors can help the IT organization develop and promote a business case for virtualization by including these important benefits in an ROI study that demonstrates the value of virtualization in terms of multiple metrics, including:

• Reduced physical server count (capital expenditure [capex] benefit at end of life)
• Reduced server maintenance costs (operating expenditure [opex] benefit until server end of life)
• Reduced server administration costs (opex savings until server end of life)
• Reduction of data center space requirement (immediate opex benefit and possible deferral of capex; for example, avoidance of data center expansion or need for collocation space)
• Reduction in energy cost for servers (opex saving)
• Reduction in data center energy cost in terms of both power and cooling (opex saving – scale the server energy cost savings based on the data center power usage effectiveness [PUE])

Vendors should work with the customer to promote understanding of these multiple benefit areas and create a cohesive business case for evolving to a green IT organization, with an indication of the likely benefits to be derived.

A green IT organization entails much more than just server virtualization, and vendors should approach this challenge by offering a programmatic approach through which the various aspects may be addressed in a systematic manner. This requires intense collaboration between the IT organization and the rest of the organization to jointly develop a shared ownership model for achieving and maintaining green IT credentials and to benefit from reduced IT operations expense and increased contribution to the corporate social responsibility program results.

Adopting a Programmatic Approach to Green IT

To capitalize on the potential for IT energy saving, it is necessary to consider how to optimize the energy consumption associated with the many "moving parts" that are involved in IT services delivery. To accomplish this in a transparent, measurable, comparable and consistent manner, frameworks such as the environmental product life cycle assessment should be utilized.

A high-level model for a programmatic approach should target the following areas within an integrated plan that includes:

• Software applications
• Servers
• Storage
• Data
• End-user devices
• Print and output devices
• Data center facilities
• IT operations
• Power modeling
• Power monitoring and reporting

Vendors should work with the IT organization and the end-user organization to facilitate the creation of a shared ownership action plan by: identifying and categorizing requirements; modeling or estimating potential energy savings and reduction of carbon footprint; prioritizing associated activities and initiatives; and executing the plan and monitoring/reporting results gathered from key performance indicators.

The Importance of Server Virtualization to Green IT

So-called "server-sprawl" – caused in part by inefficient procurement process and "server hugging" application architectures – results in underutilized servers and is one of the biggest and most obvious causes of unnecessary energy consumption.

Gartner estimates that most x86 server estates are running at less than 30% utilization. In such an environment, for every one unit of electricity consumed in usual work done by a server, a further five units of electricity are consumed to power the server's unused capacity and for the associated cooling (assuming a data center PUE of 1.8).

Virtualization of the server estate to reduce physical server count and increase utilization is therefore a key priority for both the IT organization and the end-user organization.

Leading a Programmatic Approach to Green IT With Server Virtualization

Gartner has identified certain key steps that vendors could adopt to assist an organization that is considering a server virtualization program.

Build Application Inventory
When planning a virtualization program, the end-user organization should create an inventory of all applications that are necessary to support its business activities. Each application should be examined to establish whether it is a candidate for running in a virtualized environment – not all applications are capable of being run on other than a physical server image.

The application inventory should then be categorized to create a list of all applications that will not be migrated to the virtualized environment by excluding those applications that can be retired or consolidated or are not suitable for running in a virtualized environment. This will help reduce the number of applications to be migrated to the virtualized environment.

Profile Applications
Vendors should work with the IT organization to estimate the resources required to support applications during both normal and peak workloads since this will assist with planning/sizing the virtualized environment.

Applications that consume a significant quantity of infrastructure resources should be considered as high-priority candidates for tuning (runtime optimization). Vendors should advise the IT organization regarding application tuning because this will help in reducing server workloads.

Review Disaster Recovery Architecture
A virtualization program affords an opportunity to re-evaluate disaster recovery architectures. Vendors should work with the IT organization to optimize such configurations by validating the potential to migrate from dedicated (active-passive) to "n+1" clustering This reduces the number of servers that are being operated in "standby" mode, saving energy.

Establish Current Power Baseline
Prior to executing the migration plan, vendors should assist the IT organization with monitoring the power consumption of the existing server estate to establish a consumption baseline against which the benefits achieved through the virtualization program may be validated.

IT organizations need to work with other parts of the business, and in particular with facilities management, to gain visibility into current power suppliers, tariffs and costs. Vendors can assist this be providing tools to monitor costs.

Model Power Scenarios
Each of the foregoing considerations will have a potential impact on the size of the virtualized server environment and the power requirements. Vendors should work with the IT organization to model different scenarios to establish the relative impact of each consideration and the associated cost and risk and to identify the likely power and carbon savings to be achieved.

Review Software Licensing
Migrating and/or consolidating applications from physical to virtual servers may have an impact on software licensing. While some licenses are priced per physical server, others may be licensed per processor core or per virtual instance (for a more detailed explanation, see "Server Virtualization for x86: A Benefits Impact Assessment"). Vendors should work with end-user organizations to identify applications that can work on virtual servers and to assess the licensing impact of such a move.

Developing the Migration Plan
To be successful in virtualizing servers and applications, careful planning is required. After calculations have been made to determine the optimum configuration for an end user's virtualized environment, testing has to be performed to identify and validate migration and application performance assumptions.

End-user organizations will expect vendors to provide support for applications migrating onto virtualized environments. Vendors need to show end-user organizations that they have experience with virtualization and that their tools can work equally well in virtual or physical environments.

Managing Service Levels in a Virtualized Environment
When migrating to a virtualization environment, it is important to avoid adversely impacting committed service levels. Traditional management tools may no longer work, and vendors should assist the IT organization with tools to help in monitoring and managing application systems and workloads running in the virtualized environment.

Existing IT management processes, such as configuration management, change management and problem management, may be impacted by the move to a virtualized environment. In particular, certain regulatory or compliance requirements of the end-user organization may dictate a change to previously accepted/approved processes. For example, operational policies, such as backup, may be impacted by a move from a physical server to a virtualized environment. Certain businesses may have security or audit requirements that were previously satisfied by the physical server environment but may be comprised by a virtualized environment.

Executing the Migration Plan
Performing the migration to a virtualized environment by executing the migration plan may seem to some as a high-profile and high-risk undertaking, with potential to dispute business operations. Vendors can assist the IT organization and end-user organization during this critical time by providing program management expertise, a flexible technical resource pool and tools to facilitate the migration – such as data replication, testing/certification and so forth.

Monitoring and Reporting
Power drawn by the virtualized server environment should be monitored and recorded and compared with the power consumption of the remaining physical server environment, or with apportioned figures derived from the power usage baseline (as discussed earlier in this document) if monitoring of the physical server environment is no longer being performed.

Vendors can assist with this activity and with calculating in reporting the actual power consumption savings being achieved through the migration to a virtualized server environment.

Asserting Green Credentials
By thorough preparation for virtualization, the IT organization and end-user organization will minimize the cost, risk and disruption of such a program.

Long-term sustainability benefits are likely to include:

• Improved server utilization
• Reduced capex for server replacement
• Increased flexibility to adjust server infrastructure to accommodate changes in workload and capacity demand
• Significant power cost savings
• A reduction in the organization's carbon footprint
• Increased collaboration between the IT organization and the end-user organization
• C-level visibility for the contribution made by the IT organization to the organization's corporate social responsibility program

Although often considered as a technical endeavor or necessity, a migration to a virtualized server environment can also provide many additional benefits, as indicated in this list. Vendors can assist organizations by helping them undertake this activity in a programmatic manner, with collaboration between various stakeholders and with visibility for the impact of the program on lowering energy consumption and driving a reduction in carbon footprint.

Accelerating the Transition to Embed a Long-Term Environmental Sustainability Strategy

Visibility for success with a server virtualization program should be seen as a catalyst to further evolve the organization's green IT initiatives.

Vendors should work with the IT organization and the end-user organization to promote additional benefits and cost savings by evaluating the following program components:

• Rationalizing storage environments
• Reducing data storage requirements
• Ensuring power saving on end-user devices
• Consolidating print and output devices and methods
• Reviewing the PUE of the data center itself
• Accelerating IT operations automation

BACKGROUND AND CONTEXT

The virtualization market in EMEA is set for a CAGR of 16.5% from 2008 through 2013, when it will be worth €834.8 million. The biggest growth will be in HVDs, which will be worth €96.1 million in 2013, with a CAGR of 62.7%.

Source: Gartner (October 2009)

For vendors to take advantage of this growth, they need to align their R&D and portfolio strategy around the proposition for (and benefits from) virtualization – not only from the perspective of reducing physical server count, but also with the consequent efficiency improvements of server utilization in comparison to energy consumption, carbon footprint and energy management.

The assessment of environmental costs and benefits in terms of the sustainability footprint starts in the "design for environment" stage, attributing components and materials of the server, all the way through the software interfaces it can utilize to manage server interaction and virtualization most efficiently. Those benefits can be positioned to customers beyond just the fact of imminent and immediate cost-benefits on asset savings through reduction of the installed base of servers.

THE IMPACT

Virtualization is the first and most significant step on the road to cost savings and to shift carbon footprint and energy consumption from dedicated hardware platforms to a utilization- and performance-oriented networking model.

CONCLUSION

IT organizations must set realistic expectations on the amount of consolidation and environmental benefits that can be achieved with virtualization. In addition to pragmatic short-term attributors, such as energy cost savings on the server architecture, vendors can position end-to-end solutions that include the monitoring and management of energy management, as well as professional services. Organizations must adopt a collaborative posture concerning resource sharing (in the virtualized environment) and application rationalization. Vendors can play a critical role in facilitating a smooth transition to a virtualized environment, but they must be careful not to overplay what can be realistically achieved within time, budget and resource constraints.

Benchmarking power consumption before and after the migration will provide a fact-based foundation from which to gain visibility for energy and cost savings, and also to see its contribution to a corporate social responsibility program through reduction in carbon footprint. There are many potential opportunities for vendors to help the IT organization drive toward attaining its desired green credentials and taking this first step toward a green IT environment.