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Shawn P. McCarthy | The lure of blades in green IT
Internaut—Commentary: Blade systems can improve service and save power, but you have to wait a while for the payoff
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Shawn P. McCarthy
Federal data centers are under great pressure to “go green,” and it’s not just because the idea is trendy and politically correct at the moment.
Controlling — or even reducing — power consumption has become a tipping point as agencies assess potential return on investment from migrating to new systems.
Electricity is increasingly expensive, and substantial cost savings can be uncovered if large government data centers find effective ways to trim the power consumptions of their vast server collections.
Many vendors are now pitching blade systems as the best way to trim government IT power costs. In some cases, such claims are true. But blade systems have been around for about five years, and one reason they haven’t taken over federal data centers is that the economy of scale that comes from placing power supply, fan, coprocessor and backplane connections into a single integrated unit hasn’t been fully recognized — and might not be until blades occupy a large percentage of a typical data center.
But if energy costs continue to climb, cost savings through more efficient use of energy could be the variable that tips the balance in favor of blade systems. If this happens, the federal data center as we know it could soon undergo signifi- cant changes.
New federal data-sharing efforts coupled with consolidated systems and service- oriented architectures have forced federal IT managers to seek new levels of processing power. Concurrently, budgets are constrained. In many cases, this has prompted government IT managers to shift to lower-cost x86 architectures in recent years.
What they see are systems that let them increase processing power; merge multiple, often redundant systems; and reduce machine management costs while reducing power consumption. It’s a tall order, but blade systems can indeed fill the bill, as long as associated costs — such as significant reconfiguration and new programming when moving away from a legacy system — don’t overwhelm the price of the package.
Recent trends — such as increased system performance, a shift toward high-density computing and server proliferation — have contributed to this machine density and energy consumption problem.
As a result, spending on power and cooling has grown significantly in recent years. In 2005, every dollar spent on new servers required an additional 50 cents for power and cooling, up from 21 cents in 2000, according to estimates by International Data Corp.
Because government agencies are often discrete entities with their own individual operations, providing a single platform can be challenging. There is a need for greater standardization and interoperability between agencies. The Federal Enterprise Architecture is helping to nudge agencies in this direction, but the transition will be slow.
Yet if blade platforms can prove themselves powerful enough and cost-effective enough, it’s very likely that agencies will consider them an attractive, standardized solution.
Bottom line: A transition to blades could be a quick way to go green and save power, along with its other potential management advantages. But there are many variables to consider. In some cases, it may take yet another spike in power costs to make the payoff worthwhile.
Shawn P. McCarthy is a senior analyst and program manager at IDC Government Insights. E-mail him at smccarthy@ idc.com.
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