30 Minute Interview

Green IT drives the virtualization agenda

Rich Lechner, Vice-President, Energy & Environment, IBM talked to Varun Aggarwal about end-to-end virtualization and the state of Green IT

Rich Lechner

How does IBM incorporate virtualization in it’s product lines?

Virtualization is important in improving the efficiency of IT. When we talk to clients about virtualization, many of them are not experimenting anymore but are deploying it in production either on x86 using VMware or Xen or Microsoft, on Power systems or on the mainframe. Many of our clients are consolidating onto Linux Virtual Machines (VMs) running on mainframes. Server virtualization is rapidly being adopted, not just for development but for production environments as well.

What we are finding is that as clients embrace more sophisticated forms of virtualization on the server, such as on our Power systems or mainframes, because the virtualization technology is more mature here than VMware on x86, they are able to consolidate different classes of workloads and in fact to virtualize the network infrastructure as well. So, we are talking to clients not only about server virtualization but also about consolidating different types of applications be it the Web server, database server, application server, backend transaction processing—all on one physical server. So, you are not simply virtualizing servers, you are virtualizing the network infrastructure as well.

Storage virtualization is another area that is growing rapidly because, for many of our customers, storage is doubling every 9-18 months. It is growing even faster than servers, and from an energy and a space perspective, storage represents a bigger challenge for many of our clients than servers do. For storage virtualization, using technology such as our block level virtualization, you can pool multiple arrays and make them work as one array. Customers can double or even triple the utilization rate of their storage assets with this technology; they go from 20-25% utilization on an array to, in a virtualized environment, 60-70% utilization of the same array. Storage virtualization is fast gaining adoption. Green IT is a real driver for that kind of energy efficiency.

The other driver behind storage virtualization is availability. By virtualizing storage, clients can view data migrations, they can expand or contract the storage allocated to a particular application without the application having to be taken down.

We are also doing a lot around desktop virtualization. So, a thin client, from a green perspective, consumes lot less power than a traditional desktop PC, even less power than a laptop computer. It also generates less heat, so a lot of interest amongst our clients is in moving to a virtual desktop environment. Therefore, desktop virtualization is another key element.

Then there’s application virtualization where we help clients design and deploy applications that are meant to be deployed in a shared environment. What that allows is the mobility of the application to be deployed on different WebSphere application servers and physical servers in the infrastructure. The reason that this is interesting is that, from a green perspective, as you might have a hotspot in a new data center, you identify it with our management tools. Then you need to offload work from that server on to a different one or you might have a server that becomes very lightly utilized for a certain point in time in the day and you want to completely cleanse that system. So, you want to take whatever is remaining on it and move to another server so that you can shut this system down to another 6-8 hours or something. Application virtualization allows for applications to become more mobile to take advantage of moving workloads around, even between data centers. We have customers who have data centers in different geographic areas and they are looking to take advantage of lower utility rates. In the United States, it is commonplace for utility rates to vary by as much as 20 or 25% based upon the time of the day. Therefore, if you have data centers in NY and LA, you could move workloads between data centers to take advantage of different rates based on the time of day.

What are the challenges that people are facing in terms of adopting virtualization clients across the world?

There are a few inhibitors. The first is, are the applications designed to run in a virtualized environment? Applications remain that are designed or that the application vendor certifies to run in a physical dedicated server environment. We are developing tools and providing the environment to allow applications to be designed to be run in a shared virtualized infrastructure. We also provide facilities to help certify that applications will run in a virtualized environment.

The second inhibitor is organizational resistance. The end user wants his application to run in a dedicated server environment. So organizational resistance is a big inhibitor; we find two mechanisms to help overcome that. One is that if you have the tools to show the end user, or the application owner that they are going to get their fair share of the infrastructure and only pay for the portion of the infrastructure that they are using, then you can help overcome that resistance. Having a usage meter and accounting tool that allows you to accurately measure and guarantee the quality of service to the end user could also demonstrate clearly that they are only being billed for what they are using.

The second is, you can talk to an end user and say I can offer you a lower cost if you move into a shared environment and in many cases they will still say ‘no’. You can say I can get you higher availability particularly for virtualized storage and they will still say ‘no’. However, if you say to the same user that it is for a green initiative, it’s more energy efficient, it’s more environment friendly,then they will say ‘yes’. We have empirical data to show that when people resist other rational arguments, they will accept virtualization for green reasons. Moreover, this is true not only in the US but around the world.

The third big inhibitor is the management piece. Clients are finding that if they implement virtualization without the right management tools, then they increase utilization in physical assets but their labor cost can rise. The reason for this is that not only do they have these physical resources to manage but their virtual resources have proliferated and so having the right tool to allow clients to manage the virtual and the physical infrastructure in an integrated fashion is essential. What our clients tell us, is they are not looking for yet another set of unique tools to manage their virtual space in addition to their physical management console. Rather, they want tools that allows them to manage everything, both physical and virtual, in an integrated fashion.

There are usually three reasons as to why a company would go green. One is to save cost, the other is to comply with regulations and the third is to earn money through carbon credits. In a place like India where you do not have government regulations pushing you into a green environment and most small companies do not understand carbon credits and other savings from green technologies, how do you plan to tap this market?

In our experiences, there are actually four reasons as to why companies go in for virtualization. First would be the operational drivers. People are just flat out of spacing their data centers and they can’t get more compute power from them. They can’t dissipate the heat that is generated by the IT equipment. So, one reason to go green is for tactical reasons when the clients have hit some sort of operational wall.

The second reason is financial, as you said. It is not just to save the energy cost, but in our experience, if our client works with us on a holistic approach to green IT, then for every dollar that they save on energy, we are finding that they save six dollars on total operational cost. They say that if you just come and change the light bulbs, you don’t do anything for your business. There is no knock on operational benefit, but it is a good thing for the environment. If you virtualized your servers, if you begin to change how you optimize your energy use, then you will save on energy costs, software licensing as well as hardware and software maintenance. There are substantial additional benefits. The financial benefits are profound even if you are not too focused on the energy cost itself.

The third reason is regulatory, and in some markets like US, Australia, Europe, and China, these are fast growing regulatory environments, companies are expected to comply. In fact, our survey says that 80% of CEOs worldwide expect significant changes in regulatory environment around in carbon capping etc in the next five years.

The fourth reason I would say is pressure from stakeholders and this would include investors, employees, consumers etc. I questions from clients asking is green IT going to be pushed to the back burner during this economic meltdown around the world; is it going to be less important? I would say ‘no’. It is a way to save cost and defer capital investment because you can extend the life of your data center by addressing operational issues through consolidation, you can defer tons and millions of dollars of investments by a year or two. That translates into several million dollars per month of cost. Also from the stakeholder’s perspective, if you are competing for a shrinking share of a consumer’s wallet, then your ability to demonstrate that you can create a value is an incredibly important argument on top of the other benefits. In fact, I was with another company today that believes that being green is a differentiator for them in the marketplace, here in India. It would help you to compete for more employees. People want to work for a green company and you can demonstrate that your business is making every effort to become more efficient, to become more sustainable, then you have a higher likelihood of attracting and retaining talent. That’s what we are doing.

What new technologies do you see emerging with regard to green IT or virtualization?

We have just scratched the surface in terms of adoption. As you create a shared virtual environment, the relationship between the physical and virtual resources and resource optimization becomes quite complex because it is more difficult using existing management tools and visualization techniques. Some interesting visualization techniques for these shared virtualized environments are on the anvil. To give you an example, we created virtual green data centers in Second Life where clients can come in, tour and talk to an avatar and learn about the techniques involved.

Again in Second Life, we have taken two IBM data centers and rendered them using these advanced visualization techniques. For example, we have a Web server farm with x86 servers with load balancing software. The researcher took all of the existing tools and data and she rendered it as an arm rotating around a doughnut. The doughnut represents the workload of the server farm. If it is rotating smoothly, 360 degrees, it means that all of the resources in the Web server farm are being utilized optimally and if it is jerking around then you know that there is a problem. You can walk into this virtual data center and look at your load balancing software to see if it is working well or if something is wrong. Now, you go to a console and you drill down using these tools.

Existing tools and GUIs are inadequate for intuitively managing complex, virtualized, shared infrastructure. New visualization techniques are important and we are doing a lot of work in that area.

Apart from this, in storage, we announced quicksilver last year; this is solid-state storage with a much lower power and thermal footprint. Other technologies from IBM in this sphere include liquid cooling down to processor level, optical chips instead of copper which consume less power and generate less heat. In our development labs, we have optical chips that are a next generation technology and would be far more energy efficient.

varun.aggarwal@expressindia.com