If data centers were hotels...

Steve Lohr over at the New York Times has written a piece about the fact that servers are massively underutilized and if they were hotels they would be bankrupt.

He wrote that "computer servers are used at only 6 percent of their capacity on average, while data center facilities as a whole are used at 56 percent of peak performance."

This is one of the biggest selling points about virtualization - drive up utilization of the server hardware.

The piece is based on a McKinsey & Co. study by Will Forest who says "world’s data centers are projected to surpass the airline industry as a greenhouse gas polluter by 2020."

Okay great - so its not just a capacity issue, now its an "save the planet" issue.

Another of the big selling points of virtualization is the more efficient use of power, cooling, etc.

(Ed. note: The word environment can get confusing when in a server virtualization discussion - anything that has to do with environment in this blog post is related to server power and the heat they give off, cooling of said heat and the powering the cooling. (floorspace, voltage, amps, etc.???).

It's these resources that are being consumed inefficiently when the servers are running at low capacity and directly proportional - make these boxes run at higher capacities, drives down the environmental requirements and reduces the per VM costs.)

He states (via Lohr) that the negative environmental impact will come from the electricity consumed by the growing data centers and the "the carbon dioxide emissions attributable to the electricity consumed by fast-expanding data centers will rise fourfold, the study estimates".

McKinsey states (via Forest) that to help fix this IT Departments will need to "bring some of the mainframe-style management disciplines to modern data centers".

Amen. Amen. Amen.

(Ed. Note: That's our first three amen blog post).

Virtualized servers as mainframes - that's genius talking right there.

And that means big iron management, capacity management, better systems management than what existed in the past - its mainframe disciplines brought to virtualized servers.