Cisco Cisco UCS C210 M1 General-Purpose Rack-Mount Server Livre blanc
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IT & DATA MANAGEMENT RESEARCH,
INDUSTRY ANALYSIS & CONSULTING
Data Center Management: The Key Ingredient for Reducing Server Power while Increasing Data Center Capacity
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interrupting running business processes and security protocols and policies. This process of con-
tinuous resource optimization yields the highest levels of data center performance while maximizing
resource utilization and security.
Maximizing Data Center Performance While Reducing
Cost through Automation
Historically, lack of management and virtualization maturity forced IT organizations to over-provision
resources to ensure that adequate spare capacity existed to satisfy cyclical and unforeseen demand
spikes, provide disaster recovery and meet failover requirements. Common practices included allocat-
ing an extra backup server for every critical production server in the data center, some even going so
far as to reserve two extra servers in order to ensure triple redundancy. Bare-metal server provisioning
was impractical, requiring too much time and manual intervention to make it viable, which required
fully provisioned backup servers to be running at all times. These practices are an incredible waste
of human and system resources in addition to being very inefficient from a footprint and power
perspective. Even though backup servers consume a fraction of the power, hundreds or thousands of
idle servers collectively require a large amount of power and significant amounts of non-production
oriented data center space.
In an environment with a highly effective hardware manager as described above, a highly automated
In an environment with a highly effective hardware manager as described above, a highly automated
data center (independent of virtualization) pools spare servers in a bare metal state, making them
holistically available for provisioning to virtually any task within minutes. A large majority of spares
are powered down, since they can be activated and provisioned from bare-metal state in minutes when
needed. This reduces the total number of backup servers required since servers are now consumed on-
demand, quickly allocated and de-allocated as needed, shared by multiple business services. This saves
a large amount of the power formerly consumed by active backup servers. Bare-metal provisioners
must work equally well for VMs as well as “classic” (monolithic or non-virtualized) server data center
architectures.
The advent of blade computing several years ago is now reaching widespread acceptance, particularly
The advent of blade computing several years ago is now reaching widespread acceptance, particularly
due to significant advantages from power, efficiency and management perspectives. Blades pack a lot
of compute power inside of a small, modular physical space, providing a generic compute resource
that can be quickly and easily “hot swapped” if it fails. Couple these hardware advantages with the new
breed of automated management technology that allows rapid bare-metal provisioning, policy-based
virtualization and an orchestrator that dynamically and automatically moves workloads when a blade
fails, or if business demand changes, and blade computing can provide a very strong business case.
Data Center Power Considerations
As mentioned previously, power capacity is a key data center and cost efficiency driver. In addition
to the core power requirements for data center elements, every dollar spent powering the data center
also incurs a dollar cost to power, heat and cool the hardware. As data center densities continue to
increase, power constraints often limit scalability long before physical space runs out. Maximizing
power utilization efficiencies not only increases data center capabilities, but it also decreases power/
performance cost and environmental impact. As discussed above, the real business benefit is increased
compute carrying capacity of existing data centers, deferring or completely avoiding additional data
center build-outs.