VirtualInstruments

Reduce Environmental Costs

Here's How Virtual Instruments Helps You Go Green!

Virtual Instruments is a company focused on helping our customers reach peak levels of optimization and efficiency across their SANs and virtualized infrastructure. This has direct benefits to your organization’s efforts to both reduce your operating costs and be environmentally friendly.

VirtualWisdom® can be a critical element of your company’s green strategy. When you deploy Virtual Instruments products, you are instrumenting and measuring your infrastructure to provide your organization with all of the critical information needed to reduce power consumption, air conditioning, and floor space requirements related to your SAN and virtual server infrastructure. 

Here's how Virtual Instruments contribute to your Green objectives.

Reduce SAN Devices
VirtualWisdom identifies over-provisioned SANs. Nearly all SANs are over-provisioned and if you have a second or backup SAN, you are doubly over-provisioned.  Virtual Instruments will quantify exactly the amount of over-provisioning by looking at detailed utilization information. With this information you can consolidate ports and avoid purchasing additional SAN switches. Port savings of up to 50% are not uncommon.  This reduction in SAN devices via the avoidance of unnecessary SAN switch purchases results in:

• Lower power consumption
• Less required cooling
• Lower floor space requirementsLess e-waste
   

Lower Power Consumption
VirtualWisdom can help you implement storage tiering based on actual performance measurements. Using the latency and response time data supplied by Virtual Instruments, you can determine which applications require expensive, power consuming tier 1 storage arrays and which applications can be deployed with lower cost tier 2 storage arrays. Tier 1 arrays are typically 15K RPM Fiber channel drives configured in RAID 10 configuration. Tier 2 arrays are typically higher capacity 7200 RPM SATA drives configured in a RAID 5 configuration. With this information you can deploy the appropriate tier of storage based on the actual performance needs of the applications. Deploying tier 2 storage arrays instead of tier 1 arrays results in:

• Lower power consumption as tier 2 drives are slower and consume about 60% of the power of tier 1 drives. In addition, due to the RAID configurations, fewer drives are needed as RAID 5 requires fewer drives than a RAID 10 configuration for a given capacity.
• Less required cooling as the tier 2 devices generate significantly less heat as they are spinning at a slower rate.  Also, fewer drives require less cooling.
• Lower floor space requirements as tier 2 drives are denser than tier 1 drives, increasing the GB/square foot ratio by close to 2X.  The benefit will be even higher if the RAID configuration is RAID 5.
   

Improve Server Consolidation Ratios
VirtualWisdom provides SAN I/O performance and utilization data back into VMware’s virtual center.  This enables virtual machine load balancing and vMotion triggering based on actual I/O data, not just CPU and memory utilization. Today, virtual machine deployment and load balancing is only based on CPU and memory utilization. When vCenter has data from CPU, memory and I/O, load balancing can be greatly improved and server consolidation ratios significantly increased.  Deploying more VMs per physical server means utilizing less physical servers, which results in:

• Lower power consumption
• Less required cooling
• Lower floor space requirements
• Less e-waste
   

Accelerate Problem Identification and Resolution
VirtualWisdom dramatically accelerates problem identification and resolution. Without the instrumentation and measurement capabilities of Virtual Instruments deployed in your SAN infrastructure, troubleshooting can easily takes weeks or even months as opposed to minutes or hours, with dozens of visits from the services organizations of your various SAN component suppliers. With Virtual Instruments solutions installed, you eliminate nearly all of those wasted trips, speeding up resolution and saving gasoline and CO2 emissions.   

Finally, as a side effect from using fewer and more cost-effective storage devices and fewer switches, you will also benefit from reduced systems and SAN administration expenses and reduced software licensing expenses.  Overall, Virtual Instruments can help your green initiatives in a variety of ways that both help the environment and your company’s bottom line.