Internet security company Symantec is embracing its technology to enable a company-wide green IT initiative as part of its corporate responsibility. Tech&U talks to Eric Hoh, Symantec’s vice president, Asia South to find out more.

Q: Green data centre has become a favourite topic of discussion in IT. Why is that so?
A: The discussion on green data centres is relevant as it not only helps businesses fulfil their commitment to the environment, but also offers an alternative to manage their data centre efficiently and reduce costs dramatically.

Traditionally, the power required for non-IT equipment such as cooling, fans and pumps represent about 60 per cent of total annual energy consumption. To make matters worse, energy costs will emerge as the second-highest operating cost in 70 per cent of worldwide data centre facilities by 2009, according to a Gartner report published in Nov 2006.

Clearly, the data centre represents one of the largest consumers of power in an organisation.

Closer to home, the recent rise in power consumption costs is not making it easier for organisations. As of early July, power tariffs escalated 26 per cent for commercial and industrial sectors, and 18 per cent for households.

Reducing energy consumption is more than just being environmentally responsible. Think of the energy saved, which translates into cost savings. Many of the energy-efficient tools and practices are also designed to reduce IT complexity, streamline operations and control costs. In short, greening the data centre does make business sense.

Q: What is the current issue surrounding the implementation of green data centres?
A: While the discussion on green data centres is increasingly prominent, businesses are struggling to adopt greener data centres, indicating a disparity between awareness and implementation.

According to Symantec’s Global Green Data Centre Report released in November last year, nearly 75 per cent of the respondents expressed interest in adopting a strategic green data centre initiative, but only one in seven had been successful in the actual implementation.

The report emphasised the reality that the main reasons driving the implementation of green strategies revolved around meeting business goals and reducing costs. While energy efficiency is a priority, it must be balanced by business needs.

To better manage and reduce costs, many data centre professionals are increasingly turning to software solutions.

Q: Can you elaborate on this matter?
A: Instead of depending on energy-efficient equipment, organisations can create greener data centres by using a software approach to lower hardware power consumption and cooling needs, and at the same time manage data centre complexities.

A software approach includes improving storage utilisation to reduce energy consumption. Data centre managers should consolidate storage to maximise the existing storage hardware potential. By leveraging on an enterprise SAN (storage-attached network), storage can be pooled for better utilisation, sharing and scalability.

In addition, organisations can utilise software to enable storage tiering, which involves moving less mission-critical data to tier-two or tier-three storage. This lower-tiered storage is relatively cheaper, consumes less power and requires less cooling.

Software can also be used to consolidate servers. By leveraging on virtualisation and improving server consolidation, companies can reduce the need to power-up more physical servers and lower power consumption. Virtualisation at the server level typically helps bring down redundancy by enabling server consolidation and improving server density.

Businesses can reduce power consumption by identifying duplicate data as enterprises often retain too many data copies. A typical organisation may have between 10 and

30 copies of each production data byte, and many of these copies are no longer needed, misplaced or enterprises may not even realise their existence.

Reducing the number of data copies helps lower storage capacity requirements, ensures efficiency of storage utilisation and as a result, minimises power consumption to run redundant storage.

Q: What are some Symantec products that allow companies to create a greener data centre?
A: Symantec uses a combination of its data centre management software, including Veritas Cluster Server, Storage Foundation/ CommandCentral Storage and Veritas NetBackup, to improve storage and server utilisation, and manage effective backup and data de-duplication. These are some solutions that companies can adopt to enhance the effectiveness of the software approach in remediating energy problems and at the same time maintaining efficient data centres.

Apart from demonstrating energy savings in their data centres, customers are able to double their server utilisation rates from 30 or 40 per cent to 70 or 80 per cent. They can also reduce storage requirements through data de-duplication by more than 500 times with Symantec software.