Enterprise data centers are facing a crisis as power and cooling costs continue to escalate. The U.S. EPA has issued a call to action to curb the growth of data center energy usage, which if left unchecked could nearly double by 2011. IDC warns with current trends, server energy costs could increase from $14 billion to $50 billion a year by the end of the decade. Gartner findings indicate 50% of data centers will have insufficient power and cooling by 2008, forcing difficult and expensive
infrastructure decisions.

Data center concerns around managing power and cooling requirements and costs, server real estate, and growing numbers of servers are fueling a massive increase in virtualization and consolidation efforts by enterprises. One of the key goals for enterprises is to reduce energy requirements to extend the lifecycle of existing infrastructures and to lower the growth rate in infrastructure upgrades or expansion.

The fast growth in virtualization and consolidation projects has led to a rapid increase in memory required to support the virtualization Host Servers with capacities of up to 64GB today—and even greater needs for memory capacity in the near future. Multicore processors and memory are essential in building the virtual infrastructure required to support increasing workloads without major performance issues. As more workloads can be supported by a virtualization Host Server, more physical servers can be virtualized and removed from the data center. PG&E estimates that each physical server that is eliminated saves a company $600–$1,200 a year in power and cooling costs alone.

In a single example, Kingston measured a 4-way server with 64GB of memory and compared the use of sixteen 4GB modules versus thirty-two 2GB modules. For every 100 servers where 4GB were used exclusively, Kingston estimated server power consumption savings on the order of 220,000 kWh over a 3-year lifecycle. The 64GB memory content would also enable more consolidations, where each

Download “Memory Provisioning Recommendations for VMware Infrastructure 3”
Operational Best Practices

For more information on Kingston Technology memory please call GreenPages 1-800-989-2989.