The good news for my team- the data center stayed up 100% of the time. In fact, we lost only 1 rail communications cabinet during 10 hours of an outage.

This means that our phones were up, even when cell phones were not. Our Internet was online and we could communicate with our customers. Our emergency operations center (EOC) was live and effective. I was proud to see NCTD keep bus and rail service in play hours into an outage that was so significant for the region.

More than anything, I know that without the data center project, we would not have achieved this success.

Not everything was smooth and I don’t want to overstate the positives… but I am confident without our green data center, our EOC team would have struggled that much more. So here is to investment in technology and the ability to see a ROI.

This is a large undertaking for a small entity like NCTD.  While I can justify the project purely on the long-term anticipated Return-on-Investment, the deal was sweetened by meeting all of the requirements for the Federal Stimulus program.

The overall project has several elements that will hopefully qualify it for LEED certification, including:

• The anticipated reduction in power demand and increase in power utilization efficiency in the facility
• The re-use of the building, and materials within the facility for the project (for example, we are supplementing our green fire system instead of replacing it, we’re going to reuse doors instead of purchasing new ones, etc.
• The ability to reset the ambient temperature of the data center much higher – we expect to set it around 80 degrees instead of the 68 we maintain today
• The installation of over 220 Kw solar system onsite to more than offset the power draw of the data center
• The use of in-line cooling instead of the two air handling units currently in the room (these will be recycled for other purposes in the District)

In addition, as I’ve mentioned in previous posts, the District has been committed over the last two years to slowly introducing greener, more sustainable approaches to our information technology infrastructure, including virtualization and consolidation, switching to blade server technology, replacing older equipment with more energy-efficient equipment, and testing desktop virtualization.

All of these steps make solid financial sense for the District – an especially important consideration given the tight financial times we are currently facing.  I could not in good conscience recommend these investments if I could not show solid ROI for our troubles.  While we want to be an agency with a priority on sustainability as part of our mission, it is logical that we could not choose to make these investments if they required a corresponding reduction in service or positions at the District.  Instead, choosing to follow the more sustainable path will realize direct operating cost savings on a monthly basis for the District.

We of course face some challenges to our ambitious timeline.  One of those challenges is the delay of a system migration project by 90 days after its anticipated completion.  This project is attempting to move our Prime System applications (installed in 1986) from a minicomputer to a client-server web interface.  We cannot risk downtime on this environment and therefore out-of-the gate may see a 90-day delay.  But every IT project faces challenges, and I am confident the team will find an approach that gives us what we need.

Over the next several weeks I will be blogging about the adventures of upgrading our data center.  Hopefully in March I will be able to say that we’ve completed the work and that we are on track with our ROI.

The second compelling reason is to try to extend the lifetime of some of our desktop investment.  I previously discussed my choice to upgrade user machines with memory and larger hard disks in an attempt to get at least 2 more years out of the machines.  My hope is that desktop virtualization will allow us to contemplate an operating system upgrade without needing to replace every machine at the office.

Our test environment consists of an HPBlade 460, 3 small HP thin clients, 1 HP 6910p laptop, and 2 HP 5100dct desktops.  We acquired a VMWare VDI bundle for a relatively small investment and will run our test with these tools.  Our plan is to test a variety of elements:  stability of the desktop environment, ease of deploying new desktops, the performance of the desktops with a variety of virtual server builds, and performance on the different types of hardware.

We will also be analyzing and researching the power requirements for each of these scenarios.  Our hope is that we might see a reduced power requirement even on the older hardware because the server will be doing the ‘heavy lifting’ on the desktop.

After our test, I’ll post the different results we see, including an analysis of whether pursuing a desktop virtualization strategy is ‘greener’ than continuing with our current approach.

Dig deeper on the issues:

I relied on the following sites for analysis in support of this post:

Virtual Strategy Magazine

Infoworld Article

VMWare Green Marketing

Based on this project, I’ve now added some energy star and energy demand purchasing requirements to my standard specifications.  Taking this small step will not increase my company’s expenses significantly, but should prevent us from acquiring technology that doesn’t fit in with my architectural statement to purchase lower energy components where possible. 

For example, I previously did not include a specific power requirement as part of my specification for some display panels I purchased for our board room, and unfortunately not including this resulted in a lower bid on plasma panels instead of LCD.  Plasma panels will cost us more in operating costs over time than the LCDs just based on the power draw.  So not including power as a specification in the purchasing process can lead to higher total cost of ownership – a mistake I will not repeat.

Small steps can lead to wiser decisions, cost savings, and greener IT.

Dig deeper on the issues:

I relied on the following sites for analysis in support of this post:

Ernest Orlando Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Report on Energy Usage

The design element which differentiates this chip is its native quad-core design which allows each core to be utilized and managed independently. This is a strong design element from the power-management perspective: in the duo-core paired design, the paired cores generally run at the same power level. So if one core is at 75% power so is the other no matter what the processing requirement. In the native quad-core design, the power requirements of each core are managed independently. This simple design change delivers significant power savings.

While some reviewers are saying that AMD is very late to the quad-core game, I believe their design philosophy and the significant power savings prove worth the wait. In addition to the native power savings this chip provides, the sophisticated tools for server virtualization are very strong. Strong enough that Rackspace Managed Hosting decided to deploy the chip after rigorous testing throughout their hosted data center.

We should see over the next several weeks testing centers putting this chip through the paces versus other competitive offerings. I look forward to seeing what the guys at Tom’s Hardware have to say toward validating the performance statements from AMD’s marketing department.

Dig deeper on the issues:

I relied on the following sites for analysis in support of this post:

AMD
TechTarget
CIO
Sustainable IT Blog