A UBM white paper

august 2010

Data Center Efficiency in the

Virtual Era: Three Key Steps
Step 1: Standardize

Brought to you by
 Defining Data Center Efficiency:
Standardization Is Job One
Rapid changes in the business environment
have put tremendous pressure on IT infra-
structures. Tough global competition requires
new levels of operational performance and a
tight lid on costs. Executives, customers, reg-
ulators, and investors are ever more demand-
ing. And the economic roller coaster hasn’t
made anything easier.
At first, enterprises turned to faster and
more powerful hardware. But buying a com-
pany’s way into better operations is expen-
2
sive and highly inefficient. Companies that
tried quickly ran out of room for new equip-
ment and the power and cooling to run it.
Some corporations have experimented
with simplifying their infrastructure: using
some server consolidation here, a little vir-
tualization there. But without solving the
underlying inefficiencies, even those solu-
Step 1: Standardize
Data center efficiency begins with standardiza-
tion, which is an antidote to the patchwork style
of growth in the 1990s and early 2000s. During
that period, IT addressed each new business
need that arose by purchasing software, hard-
ware, and services—often for one application
alone. Resources were provided to handle the
application’s peak workload plus an additional
25 to 50 percent to guarantee performance.
As these silos grew with no an overall strategy,
data centers became a vast field of underutilized
capacity. The cost of housing, power, cooling,
and administration took over the IT budget,
especially as costs and demands continued to rise
and budgets continued to tighten.
The pressure on IT organizations isn’t going
away any time soon. Case in point: The 2010
InformationWeek Analytics State of the Data
Center survey shows that only 30 percent of
business technology professionals had larger
data center budgets for 2010 compared with
2009, yet half faced higher resource demands.
tions became just another way to spend more
money on IT.
To achieve their business goals and
unlock the value of their infrastructures,
companies need a more disciplined and struc-
tured way to eliminate inefficiencies. A grow-
ing number are reaping benefits from a
three-step process: standardize, simplify, and
automate.
This first installment in a three-part series
explores how standardization forms the basis
for deriving value from the efforts that fol-
low. By following these steps in order, corpo-
rations can ensure that their infrastructures
provide the flexibility to meet current and
future demands while preserving ROI from
existing technology investments and build-
ing a foundation for new tech investments to
carry efficiency forward.
Standardization lays the foundation for solv-
ing these issues. It begins to remove the com-
plexity of administering and maintaining diverse
systems. Staff can work more efficiently, because
the need for specialized expertise in different
systems diminishes. Purchasing, upgrading, and
inventory management also become easier.
As enterprises continue to turn to virtualiza-
tion, standardization makes even more sense.
When software and hardware were more closely
linked, the choice of underlying server was
extremely important to the outcome. But the
trend toward virtualization has severed that link.
“A lot of software people don’t care what
you’re using for hardware,” explains Alan
Zeichick, principal analyst at Camden Associates.
“When you’re running in a virtualized environ-
ment, as long as you can get the virtual system
up and running, you don’t care.”
According to Zeichick, that change makes
the case for standardization even stronger. “All
of the old reasons for standardizing remain,”
he says. “Better purchasing power, upgrades
 UBM TECHWEB WHITE PAPER | Data Center Efficiency in the Virtual Era: Three Key Steps

but in terms of data center efficiency, four are

IT leaders who are successfully increasing data critical:
center efficiency tend to select the plat­forms that will meet their • Platform
• Server
needs, standardize on a single family, and, within a family, stick to a
• Communications
limited set of platform types.
• Networking and storage.

and patches, easier decision making, simpler
stocking of spare parts, especially in terms of
specific models.” In addition, he says, the ease
of decision-making means greater flexibility to
react to changing business issues, the ability to
consolidate purchases, and the simplification of
the whole service environment.
As a result, standardization leads directly to
a lower total cost of ownership (TCO) derived
from lower maintenance costs, improved opera-
tional efficiency, reduced parts inventories and
simplified service contracts.
3 Standardization can apply in many areas,
The following sections explore benefits, chal-
lenges and guidelines for each.
A Standard Platform Makes
Management Easier
The breadth of choices for data center infrastruc-
ture is huge. Virtually every maker of comput-
ers, regardless of processor type, bus type or
intended operating system makes a server. In
addition, there are white-box server platforms
that are transformed into appliances, and there
are purpose-built infrastructure items for every-
thing from security to high-speed switching.

Dell Takes its Own Standardization Advice

When Dell, Inc. set out on a three-year journey to boost data center efficiency,
it turned to its own Infrastructure Consulting Services (ICS)—the same group
that advises the company’s customers—for advice. First on the to-do list:
Simplifying the complicated mix of proprietary and open server and network
technologies that populated its data centers.
“Dell made the decision…to focus on driving everything with the x86
platform as the standard,” Dell CIO Robin Johnson explained in an interview
in Dell Power Solutions magazine earlier this year. “We didn’t just standard-
ize the low-risk systems, the remote office systems, and the file-and-print
systems. We took our core transaction processing—all of Dell.com, all of our
management systems, all of our financial applications—and put approximately
97 percent of it onto an x86 platform.”1
Ultimately, Dell standardized on just a handful of similar x86 servers for
all its needs. Today, the company uses just four kinds of two-way servers and
two kinds of four-way servers.
Standardizing its silos of proprietary storage was a more complex issue.
A review by ICS determined that it didn’t make sense to have Fibre Channel
everywhere. So the company kept the Fibre Channel where it made sense
for performance and security, but not elsewhere. Gradually, the company
replaced Fibre Channel with iSCSI storage where it made sense to do so.
The effort to remove silos and settle on open standard architectures
enabled massive virtualization-based simplification. Virtualizing more than
8,000 servers has saved the company $57 million. At the same time, Dell
improved its server utilization by 30 percent and accelerated application devel-
opment by 90 percent.
1
“Executive Q&A: Robin Johnson,” reprint from Efficient Enterprise, a special edition of Dell Power Solutions, 2010.
 UBM TECHWEB WHITE PAPER | Data Center Efficiency in the Virtual Era: Three Key Steps
While servers will necessarily be somewhat different
depending on where they are in the upgrade cycle, the efficient data
center should aim for consistency.
But just because there are a lot of choices
doesn’t mean that companies should choose
completely freely. Data center expert Jack Gold,
principal analyst at J. Gold Associates, explains
that it makes the most sense to stick with an
industry standard architecture. “The majority of
companies today are better off standardizing on
a commodity market,” Gold says. That’s because
x86 and x64-based systems are so prevalent
that the cost is almost always lower than that
of equivalent systems using other architectures.
Standardizing on open systems such as
Intel x86 and x64 processors ensures that most
4 commonly used server, workstation and infra-
structure software (storage and application serv-
ers, for example) will work in the environ-
ment. Processor standardization results in easier
management, commonality of software choices,
easier stocking of spare parts, and easier reas-
signment of roles among servers as loads and
needs change.
Standardization allows for a modular design
in the data center. “If you have 50 servers and
they’re all the same,” Gold says, “if a couple go
down you can swap components if you need
to.” Swapping out a server needing maintenance
with a fresh server is simply a matter of sliding
one chassis out of the rack and sliding another
in. Everything from cable management to cooling
should be unaffected.
The same holds true for adding capacity.
For example, if Web traffic picks up, adding an
additional two-way Intel Xeon processor-based
server to a rack that’s already supporting one
would be easy. If it’s the same as the one that’s
already running the Web service, simply bringing
up an additional instance of the software doubles
the capacity. The management requirements
wouldn’t change, and no software changes
would be needed.
But for standardization to be most effective,
the platform choices must show more common-
ality than simply the choice of processor brand.
The processors must be of the same type and
use the same support architecture, memory and
drivers to the extent possible.
If the data center uses an Intel Xeon proces-
sor for servers, for example, it should use related
Intel Xeon processors whether the server is a
two-way or a four-way device. Likewise, the serv-
ers should use common memory components,
storage architecture, and communications.
IT leaders who are successfully increasing
data center efficiency tend to select the plat-
forms that will meet their needs, standardize on
a single family, and, within a family, stick to a
limited set of platform types. Otherwise, costs
tend to go out of control and management
becomes impossibly complicated.
Standard Server Form Factors Aid in
Upgrades, Power and Cooling
Although it’s unlikely that any data center will
be made up entirely of identical servers, it makes
good economic sense to standardize on one or
two basic form factors. Doing so facilitates the
process of populating the racks and planning
for power distribution, cable management and
cooling. In addition, standardizing on a mini-
mal set of allowed form factors means you can
swap servers when a different level of capacity is
needed or when servers are upgraded.
A data center manager might plan to use
only 1U or 2U servers in the racks, for example.
This approach would provide significant density,
but would also make it easy to upgrade to a new
server. Planning power and cooling requirements
for racks is significantly simpler when everything
in the rack is basically the same.
“In terms of servers…if you stay with the
same hardware, it’s easier to allocate if you know
that all of your servers are roughly the same,”
Zeichick says. “They should all be the same quad
server or dual processor box. If … you have dif-
ferent capabilities or different connectivity—that
gets messy.”
While servers will necessarily be somewhat
different depending on where they are in the
upgrade cycle, the efficient data center should
aim for consistency. “The more identical you can
make them, the more efficient you can make
them,” Zeichick explains. “They should all have
the same hardware, processor and memory, the
same connection, the same number of steps to
the router or load balancer. You want to remove
anything that makes them different.”
Standards in Communications
Can Lay the Foundation for the Future
The data center communications environment
must also be standardized to the extent possible.
While a data center that’s being upgraded or
 UBM TECHWEB WHITE PAPER | Data Center Efficiency in the Virtual Era: Three Key Steps

Data Center Trends report, which notes that

Although it may be marginally more expensive up
front to buy from a standard set of platforms, in the long run, the
total cost of ownership is lower.
transitioned may have legacy communications or
storage, the number of platforms in use should
be minimized—to the extent that’s possible
without affecting the ROI of existing systems.
At the same time, IT organizations must lay the
groundwork for future changes.
For data communications within the data
center and the enterprise, the only real option
in use today is Ethernet. But when it comes to
storage communications, data center staff can
choose between Ethernet and Fibre Channel.
Ethernet’s speed and robustness continue
to improve; 10 Gigabit Ethernet is the current
5 data center standard, 40 Gigabit speeds are
under development, and research on 100 Gigabit
Ethernet is underway.
That’s why many enterprises are migrat-
ing to 10Gb Ethernet, according to the
InformationWeek/Network Computing 2010
most equipment vendors already support 10 Gb
Ethernet in the data center as a standard.
“Although there is speculation about which
standards will end up being successful in the
marketplace, there are very few network vendors
that are not engaged in the move to Converged
Enhanced Ethernet (CCE),” according to the
report. CCE uses copper-based 10 Gb Ethernet
within the data center.
Even so, many data centers have significant
existing investments in Fibre Channel storage
networking, which continues to perform reli-
ably. Fibre Channel is a legacy protocol that was
once the primary form of networking in this
environment. SANs used specialized 4 gigabit per
second fiber and switches. Servers that attached
to storage were required to have separate Fibre
Channel cards installed.
Although Camden Associates’ Alan Zeichick
agrees that Ethernet is the best choice (“You
want what’s proven and ubiquitous,” he notes),
he doesn’t recommend jettisoning an existing
storage network before its economic lifetime is
up. “If a company already has investments in

Standards in Virtualization: A Look Ahead

Most enterprises today use virtualization at some level, and they use a
wide variety of approaches to it. In most cases, virtual systems are a way to
allow companies to have the flexibility to meet varying workload demands.
Virtualization moves processing load to the resources that have the ability
to support it and frees up processor capability on platforms that aren’t fully
utilized so they can be used by other loads.
The same standardization principles that apply in overall data center
efficiency are equally relevant to virtualization efforts. Data center expert
Jack Gold, principal analyst at J. Gold Associates, recommends picking one
virtualization platform (whether it’s VMware, Hyper-V, Xen, or another for
servers or Citrix or others for desktop virtualization) and sticking with that.
“One of the problems that companies are going to run into is that virtual-
ization and cloud computing are not really all that standardized,” Gold points
out. “If you’re running VMware versus Xen, will they run the same?”
Standardizing on one virtualization platform reduces management load,
data center complexity, and training requirements. In addition, choosing one
virtualization approach enables data center managers to choose hardware
that will work with that platform with confidence that swapping machines
or purchasing upgrades won’t interfere with the virtualized environment.
 UBM TECHWEB WHITE PAPER | Data Center Efficiency in the Virtual Era: Three Key Steps
Fibre Channel, I don’t see a reason to move off
of it,” Zeichick says.
That’s because the investment in an existing
SAN is significant, and the process of migrat-
ing to a new SAN is difficult, expensive and
disruptive to the operation of the data center.
However, data centers can build bridges to the
future by implementing new SANs and new stor-
age using iSCSI and Ethernet. In this way, the
data center can gradually evolve to an Ethernet-
only environment as the Fibre Channel SANs
are replaced.
Zeichick’s observations about legacy SANs
underscore the need to build flexibility into the
data center. Doing so effectively preserves exist-
ing ROI while building a foundation for emerging
technologies.
Storage Standards
6 Network communications play a crucial role
with storage in the data center. Currently,
the standard that’s growing is Ethernet, using
iSCSI for storage traffic. The availability of
storage arrays that use iSCSI, along with the
standardization of an iSCSI Initiator in most
major server operating systems, including
Windows Server 2008 R2 and Linux, has boosted
the popularity of this storage protocol. iSCSI
will work over any Ethernet network, and can
work in parallel with other network traffic, as
long as the switches handling the traffic are
able to assign the appropriate priority to the
storage traffic.
Fibre Channel, as previously noted, still per-
sists in some legacy systems, and its infrastruc-
ture is very similar to Ethernet’s. Although the
switches require different fabrics and the storage
needs different controllers, combining a legacy
Fibre Channel storage network with a new
iSCSI Ethernet network is easy to accomplish
and cost-effective for the economic life of the
legacy system.
Beyond the communications infrastructure,
the standards for storage are only partially in
place. SAN storage devices remain highly pro-
prietary, and although the actual storage media
follow a few specific standards, the means for
moving data from the network to the storage
medium do not.
Storage hardware standards, however,
play a significant role in designing tiered stor-
age. Data center managers can choose among
expensive, high-speed disk-based storage that
allows highly transactional operations; slower
disk-based storage that’s more useful for fast
access but doesn’t deliver the performance of
transaction-based storage; and archival storage
that may be off-site, on tape, or both.
iSCSI storage has the additional benefit of
running on the same Ethernet environment as
other network traffic. This means that there’s no
learning curve as there is with Fibre Channel. The
same network management software will work
with storage traffic and other network traffic,
and the same infrastructure, including switches
and routers, can handle both types of traffic.
Those factors contribute to simplicity in the data
center, and a resulting reduction in both staff
and operational costs, as well as a reduction in
acquisition costs.
The Link Between Standardization
and Efficiency
Reducing total cost of ownership is one of the
key goals for many enterprises setting out on to
improve data center efficiency. Although it may
be marginally more expensive up front to buy
from a standard set of platforms, in the long run,
the total cost of ownership is lower. “The cost of
the hardware isn’t the only component of TCO,”
explains Jack Gold. “TCO is the overall cost of
doing business.”
Consider the complete cost of any machine
you plan to put into the data center, including
the acquisition cost, the cost to provide power
and cooling, the cost of the staff to operate
it, and of course maintenance costs. In many
cases, Gold says, the costs to operate a server,
the electricity it uses and the cost of cooling
will far exceed the cost of purchasing it in the
first place.
Virtualization is a significant factor in con-
trolling the total cost of ownership. Although it
does cost money to buy servers capable of han-
dling a virtualized environment and the neces-
sary licenses, the cost savings from only having to
run one machine instead of several make up for
it. Gold notes that advances in processor design
are making new processors with low power
requirements attractive to the data center. He
says that he expects to see a new series of servers
featuring Intel’s Atom processors because they
use less power and require less cooling over the
life of the machine.
Still, virtualization isn’t the answer for every
computer in the data center, and servers in the
 UBM WHITE PAPER | Data Center Efficiency in the Virtual Era: Three Key Steps

Intel: The Standard for Efficiency

Many companies are following the example set by global tech giant Dell and
standardizing on one platform. This kind of standardization brings benefits
(see the sidebar on Dell’s efficiency efforts, for example), but for the great-
est benefit, the selected platform must support and contribute to the efforts
to simplify and automate data centers once the standardization is complete.
Intel offers platforms to meet the flexibility, power efficiency, secu-
rity and scalability requirements of an efficient data center. Because Intel
adheres to an open standards-based approach, it preserves the enterprise’s
ability to choose solutions that meet its needs without regard to vendor.
Highlights of Intel’s enterprise-class platforms include:
• Flexible workload migration and performance optimization across
32-bit and 64-bit operating environments based on rules set by IT staff.
• Intel 10Gbe increases Ethernet speed to 10Gbps, lowers power require-
ments and reduces the number of ports, switches and cables needed.
With Data Center Bridging, it improves quality of service when data
and storage share the same network.
7 • Automated, real-time power consumption and server performance
adjustments via Intel Turbo Boost technology to meet energy-manage-
ment and variable-workload requirements.
• Intel Intelligent Power Technology can dynamically adjust CPU and
memory settings into the lowest available power state (IT staff can
also manually adjust settings).

data center won’t be identical in every instance.
There will always be some differences in the
requirements for the machines for storage, appli-
cations, Web serving or other more-specific needs.
Similarly, no one approach will meet every
need. For this reason, building flexibility into the
infrastructure through the use of open, industry
standard systems is a basic tenet of data center
efficiency.
Standardizing for Efficiency
Standardization can lower the total cost of
ownership of the data center, it can help
reduce energy consumption, and it can help the
enterprise control its acquisition costs.
Standardization also lowers maintenance costs,
reduces parts inventories, and lowers training
costs while improving flexibility. With a standard-
ized environment, the data center can grow to
meet current and future needs.
But standardization is only the first step
toward overall data center efficiency. Once the
data center unites on open, standard technolo-
gies, simplification can occur. A standardized,
simplified data center environment provides the
most stable base for the automation, the final
layer of the efficiency initiative.
Read more about the role simplification and
automation play in data center efficiency in parts
2 and 3 of this series.

Dell and Intel

Dell Inc. (NASDAQ: DELL) listens to customers and delivers innovative technology and services they value. A leading global
systems and services company uniquely enabled by its direct business model, Dell is No. 33 on the Fortune 500 list of
America’s largest companies. For more information, visit www.dell.com or to communicate directly with Dell via a variety
of online channels, go to http://www.dell.com/conversations. To get Dell news direct, visit http://www.dell.com/RSS.

Intel (NASDAQ: INTC), the world leader in silicon innovation, develops technologies, products and initiatives to con-
tinually advance how people work and live. Additional information about Intel is available at www.intel.com/pressroom
and blogs.intel.com.