Roger B.A. Klorese -March 2008
Three Steps to Delivering a Greener IT World
Few information technology directions have been as brightly positioned in the spotlight as sustainability, or “green IT” – and for good reason: unlike the latest advances in performance or programming methodology, resource utilization and environmental impact goes beyond the walls of the data center and affects everyone, not just technologists.
As optimal utilization becomes more and more a matter of long-term survival, the technologies that make it possible in the long run to save our planet also can help bring financial savings today.
Businesses should consider the following technology approaches that can make it more efficient and cost-effective to deliver the applications their users and operations require.
- Deliver, don’t install, applications: When applications and operating systems are installed at every desktop and on every server, there are obvious costs to the environment: disk storage is one of the most power-hungry components of the IT infrastructure, both to operate and to cool. (For every dollar spent to keep a computing resource running, the utility industry estimates another 80 cents spent to cool it.) If applications are stored in the data center and delivered over the network to the desktop, reductions in storage cost also yield dramatic savings in power and cooling cost. These savings apply not only to typical desktop productivity applications, but also to the user interface and client-side intelligence for enterprise applications such as Oracle’s application server product lines.
- As go the applications, so goes the operating system: Citrix has long brought the benefits of delivery to the application; now the same economies of scale and management can be achieved by operating systems. The network-based dynamic provisioning capabilities of Citrix Provisioning Server for Desktops make it possible to maintain a small number of operating system “golden images” – for some organizations, as little as a single instance – and deliver it to knowledge workers’ desktops. In addition to the storage savings (which translate to power, cooling, and real estate sustainability gains), the simplification of the software platform means less maintenance, less patching – and greatly reduced requirements for the fuel needed to get IT staff to support desktops in the field.
- More dynamic means more sustainable:. Data center costs are driven by the servers and storage that support the backbone of business processes. When data center resources can be automatically directed to the high-value business activities that require them, resources can be used more effectively, and business can do much more with much less. While server virtualization can drive the consolidation and flexibility that businesses require, fewer than ten percent of servers are currently used as virtualized platforms. To drive dynamic resource utilization and reduce overprovisioning, dynamic management must be applied to both physical and virtual resources. Citrix XenServer, Platinum Edition is the first dynamic datacenter platform supporting both virtual and physical resources – making 100% of the data center a dynamic, cost-effective driver of efficiency and sustainability.
By taking advantage of these principles of efficiency, investment in the future of the IT infrastructure and the business can also be an investment in the future of the planet.
Roger B.A. Klorese is the Senior Director of XenServer Product Marketing at Citrix Systems, Inc.
About Citrix Systems - www.citrix.com
Citrix Systems, Inc. (Nasdaq:CTXS) is the global leader and the most trusted name in application delivery infrastructure. More than 200,000 organizations worldwide rely on Citrix to deliver any application to users anywhere with the best performance, highest security and lowest cost. Citrix customers include 100% of the Fortune 100 companies and 99% of the Fortune Global 500, as well as hundreds of thousands of small businesses and prosumers. Citrix has approximately 6,200 channel and alliance partners in more than 100 countries. Annual revenue in 2007 was $1.4 billion.
