April 1, 2010
Educational Outreach reduces server energy consumption by 80 percent
You don’t need to be a computer or energy expert to see that going from 60 servers down to eight is bound to result in a huge energy savings. And that’s just what the people at UW Educational Outreach, in the UW Tower, have done.
Marc Elvy, network manager for Educational Outreach, explained. He said the department used to have a rack of 60-some servers to handle all its applications. “The reason why we had so many is that in the IT world, you have to segment off political boundaries and security boundaries — there are groups here that don’t want other groups’ stuff running on the same servers.”
So over the years, he said, as each new application came online the department was asked to buy a new server. “So pretty soon we have 60 servers — and I noticed that of these 60 servers, the capacity being used was only 1 or 2 percent. So 99 percent of the server was doing nothing — just sitting there taking up electricity.”
Elvy said he and Chad Sleeman, computer support analyst — who shares credit for this energy-saving move — have for a couple of years tracked the progress of a Microsoft program then called Virtual Machine. “The implementation was not that great in 2008. But they improved that product a great deal and we decided to use that technology.” He said the technology finally “got good enough that we decided we needed to change our paradigm here.”
Microsoft calls the new product Hyper-V Technology 2008 R2 (the V being for server virtualization), and it allows each server to host several “virtual” servers. Again, Elvy explains: “Each application has required its own server, but now you can take one powerful server and install the same operating system on it 20 times. Those are called virtual servers.”
It was time for older servers to be replaced anyhow, Elvy said, so Educational Outreach invested in eight of the Hyper-V virtual servers. “It was a matter of leveraging this technology to get the maximum utilization out of each of the physical servers.”
The old concerns about different applications running on the same server don’t apply, Elvy said, because the virtual servers run discretely and don’t interfere with each other.
Elvy estimates that the move will save the department about 80 percent of its energy cost, or about 640,000 kilowatt hours per year.
He noted that the energy reduction also is in keeping with “core values” expressed by David Szatmary, vice provost for Educational outreach. He had asked for more work on sustainability, Elvy said, “and that also inspired our move to Hyper-V.”
Oh, and the cost? Nothing, Elvy said. “It doesn’t cost us anything — we are part of the campus volume license agreement with Microsoft and these products are included.”
To learn more about UW Educational Outreach, visit online here.
