The crucial difference between the recession today and that of the early 90s is the internet

Datacentre Management Magazine, March 2009
In just fifteen years, the rise of the internet has had a revolutionary effect on business. It is one of the most powerful tools for companies of all sizes. And according to Peter Knight, CEO of adapt the web will see small and medium sized businesses (SMEs) through this recession.

The Internet is the most important tool helping small businesses through the current recession. Small businesses consider the Internet as essential to boosting their profiles, unlocking new revenue opportunities such as creating new products and services on the web and using the online space to expand into new markets.

In order to run a flexible business on the web, companies need to establish a viable presence online – easier said than done. A competitive presence on the web requires investment in back office systems. Strong IT infrastructure is required to achieve fast, low-latency Internet connectivity, nonstop operation capabilities and reliable software suites. To run this operation, SMEs need additional data centre support capable of handling the scale and the operational requirements of a 24/7 business model.

But investment in data centres clashes with an important item on the agenda – green IT. The practice of green IT stresses the importance of using IT efficiently, whereas data centres consume more energy per square foot than any other part of an office building. And as businesses seek to develop an environmentally-friendly profile to keep their customer base and attract new ones, green IT has gained significant clout on the corporate agenda.

Not only is green IT good for business it is fast becoming standard practice through legislation. In October 2008, the European Commission's Code of Conduct on Data Centres' Energy Efficiency was launched to support the EU’s initiative for carbon reduction and climate change targets – a scheme that was welcomed by the UK government, a sign that it is preparing to get tough on environmentally harmful IT.  

Consumer awareness and the political pressure to tackle climate change creates a dilemma for businesses investing in more data centres because they are universally acknowledged as one of the largest sources of greenhouse gas emissions. Physical servers produce more than 80 million tons of CO2 per year – more than is emitted from the entire country of Thailand.

As the need to expand into the online realm becomes more urgent, how do SMEs ensure that the approach they take will achieve profit whilst maintaining the company’s integrity and improving their carbon profile?

A fast and cost-effective approach to improve business performance and reduce energy consumption is to shrink the number of devices in the data centre through virtualisation. Virtualisation enables multiple workloads to run on a single machine - this eliminates the need to dedicate a single workload to a single server.

In doing so, a growing number of businesses are learning that environmental concern and business success can go hand in hand. An environmentally friendly data centre is an efficient one and one of the best ways to realise enhanced business performance and capability and achieve sustainable growth.

Virtualisation eliminates the need to over provision – the wasteful resourcing of servers and storage to ensure that they can handle the peaks and troughs in workload. In a virtualised environment multiple applications share a set of resources, accessing as much or as little of the total capacity as required and ensuring business continuity and productivity in peak times as well as quieter periods.

The need for fewer servers inevitably means less power consumed running the devices themselves, cooling them and powering other support functions such as humidification. It also frees up physical space releasing capital and reducing operational expenses.

For example, if a company virtualises 25 servers, it can reduce its annual hardware costs by approximately £65,000 and achieve energy savings of £165,475. These savings are equivalent to planting 500 trees and taking 38 cars off the road. Gartner estimates the current power savings of virtual machines is approximately 8.5 billion kWh with four tons of CO2 eliminated for every server virtualised .

Today’s technologies offer the best of both worlds – higher performance capability and reduction of carbon emissions. SMEs have the opportunity to ride out the recession and do it through a sustainable business model. Virtualisation is not only good for the environment but increasingly, the long term prosperity of the business.