We expect the Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory to operate efficiently. And indeed, the agency is making good on its mandate to achieve net-zero operations.

According to this Energy.gov post, NREL saved $88,000 in its 2010 fiscal year by, in large part, taking a virtualization-heavy approach to IT. By consolidating servers and shifting to a virtual desktop infrastructure for users at the Golden Field Office in Colorado, the data center now supports 50 virtual servers and 300 virtual desktops. And it’s that last part that adds a nice little twist to this tale.

Green is the color of IT security

Though it was included as a throwaway mention in the post, NREL reports that IT security enjoys a boost. Given the how relentlessly organizations are getting hacked these days, both in government and private industry alike, any and all methods to harden data centers are welcome ones. That enhanced data security is a byproduct of NREL’s IT energy efficiency efforts is a nice little feather in Green IT’s cap.

This is because virtual desktop infrastructures (VDI) allow admins to provide consistent, “locked down” setups for their users. For instance, network intrusions are vastly reduced when users can’t introduce damaging malware by plugging thumb drives or other USB-connected devices into their thin clients – unintentionally or otherwise. Blocking USB devices is one of the many restrictions that VDI setups allow administrators to impose.

Neat!

For more on NREL’s data center, check out this video tour below.

Can electronic medical records (EMR) help hospitals, clinics and doctor’s offices go green? Yes, but not right away.

Kaiser Permanente, a health care giant, used itself as a test case and the results are encouraging. Transitioning to electronic medical records can cut CO2 emissions by up to 1.7 million tons a year. The New York Times Bits blog reports:

In the Kaiser system, the researchers conclude, electronic health records have been decidedly green. Their use, the article says, has eliminated 1,000 tons of paper, 68 tons of X-ray film, and lowered gasoline consumption by patients by 3 million gallons a year. That more than offsets the 250 tons of plastic waste a year, mostly from tossing out old computers (all of Kaiser’s machines are recycled).

The downside? Only about a quarter of the nation’s doctors use electronic health records and research indicates that transitioning to a digital system would increase CO2 emissions by 653,000 tons.

Getting cloudy

Scary, but the shift toward electronic health records in many ways mirrors the IT’s industry’s drive toward cloud computing. In the short term, building huge data centers, outfitting them with servers and powering those facilities can negatively impact the environment. The energy efficiency gains and emissions cuts start kicking in as businesses shift their IT usage to newer, greener and leaner-running data centers and older installations and inefficient server closets are retired.

According to Microsoft, moving to the cloud can slash IT energy consumption and carbon emissions by up to 30 percent. The savings are more pronounced for mid-sized and small firms — up to 90 percent. Essentially, it’s great news for health facilities both big and small, and already one hospital in North Carolina is enjoying the benefits.

Early, encouraging days of EMR on the cloud

In December, eWeek’s healthcare IT expert, Brian Horowitz, spotlighted an EMC/VMware private cloud installation that’s helping Northern Hospital of Surry County’s handle the growth of its EMR infrastructure. He wrote:

Using EMC’s hardware, Northern Hospital has saved hundred of thousands of dollars by eliminating 20 servers and minimizing the maintenance of existing servers, EMC reports.

The hospital has also been able to lower power usage and network congestion. Northern Hospital plans to achieve 70–80 percent server virtualization within the next 12 months, according to EMC.

GE, too, is jumping in on cloud to power its Centricity Advance EMR platform. This growing market is a good opportunity for cloud startups that can handle huge data stores in a variety of formats (everything from electronic forms to medical imaging); update and deliver that data fast, securely and reliably; and navigate tough regulatory waters. Easier said than done, perhaps, but the potential is huge as doctors increasingly and inevitably trade their clipboards for tablets.

Even the job outlook for IT professionals with a penchant for medical tech looks good. So while everyone is rushing to fill every niche in the white hot social media landscape — and cash out, let’s not forget — the relatively un-sexier field of EMR could prove lucrative for entrepreneurs too.

Image credit: Flickr user Paulssons – Creative Commons

How many of your servers have been around for a decade? Not many, it’s safe to assume. (None ideally.) Chances are that the servers you deployed in 2001 were replaced 3-5 years later. And if there are a couple stragglers still around, they’re costing you a bundle in electricity and rack space.

Fortunately, longevity is creeping into the server landscape thanks to virtualization and hardware vendors that are all to0 happy to cater to the efficiency-boosting software technology. In his latest post, InfoWorld’s Paul Venezia offers some great insights that are sure to please IT execs. Sure, it flies in the face of folks that anticipate accelerated server replacement schedules because of virtualization, but there’s good reason to hope Paul’s vision plays out.

What lifted the current generation was a combination of mature hardware support for virtualization and the multicore NUMA boosts from AMD and then Intel. Those elements worked hand in glove to get us to a position where most medium-size to large enterprises find they need a remarkably small number of physical servers to run their entire data center. Unless we see a massive rise in software resource requirements, the same state of affairs could hold true for the next decade.

Neat, right? Complicit in this conspiracy to slim down the data center are Intel and AMD (soon ARM?). Both chip companies have made huge strides in crafting virtualization-friendly processors and chipsets, furthering technologies like NUMA (Non-Uniform Memory Access) that make juggling multiple server workloads possible.

This is also proving key in numerous data center consolidation projects, like the one announced today between NYC and IBM. Nestled in the press release were clues about the virtualization-heavy, cloud-ready infrastructure that will replace the city’s creaky, multi-site IT platform. Although not explicitly stated, it’s a given that virtualization — and IBM server hardware that supports it (virtually all of it, nowadays) — will feature heavily and enable the city to reduce 50 data centers to a handful, if not less. If you’re thinking big savings, you’re right.

And if the tech runs well and endures for the next 10 years, that’s great news for cash-strapped NYC — energy savings and reduced carbon emissions aside.

Image credit: Flickr user Tim Dorr – CC (Lost fans, check out those names!)

Like any technology, virtualization is a double-edged sword. Sure, the energy savings and reduced hardware costs are compelling reasons to jump on the virtual machine bandwagon, but those benefits come at a price.

Miami Dade College’s CIO, Karl Herleman, discusses how any virtualization project, particularly one as expansive in scope as his, must be weighed against potential pitfalls. Particularly, he singles out how the relative ease of commissioning virtual machines (versus physical servers) creates in users an expectation of near-instantaneous access to IT resources. The problem is that most users don’t realize the management burden that’s placed on admins.

In this Campus Technology article, Herleman explains the impact on his IT department.

That compressed time period has increased user expectations dramatically, said Herleman, “even to the point where when I deal with a lot of ‘non-technical’ users who say to me, ‘can we just create another virtual environment here?’” But remember, Herleman cautioned, that every one of those virtual environments still has to be managed, set up properly, and pointed in the direction of the correct databases and integrated systems.

“Virtualization doesn’t come totally for free,” said Herleman. “It does save money, and some time on provisioning, but these environments must still be patched and managed.” Those tasks fall squarely upon the shoulders of MDC’s IT team, which over the last four years has found itself focused on managing user expectations, which range from a perceived “ease” of creating the environments, to the massive “sprawl” that has occurred within the campus IT infrastructure.

Now in addition to managing user expectations, admins have to wrestle with virtual server sprawl. It’s a good lesson to learn and a worthwhile topic to broach in the planning stages of a virtualization/server consolidation project. Of course, you want to avoid annoying your users, but you really don’t want to have PO’ed IT staffers on your hands. Not if you value the smooth operation of your computing infrastructure, that is.

Catch the rest of the Campus Technology article for more great insights.

Is the full-featured corporate desktop going the way of the dodo? Maybe not, but Citrix and Cisco are doing their part to make them a rarity in offices where hundreds, or even thousands, of the machines currently consume vast amounts of power. Bring on the thin clients!

The companies today revealed that they plan to accelerate up the adoption of desktop virtualization by offering joint solutions that are a combination of Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) and Citrix XenDesktop. For Citrix, partnering with Cisco only strengthens its position in an arena where it’s already strong. For Cisco, the stakes are higher.

As the IT giant expands beyond networking and challenges HP, Dell and IBM in the data center with UCS, it needs all the help it can get in proving that its technology can scale and handle workloads that are steadily evolving away from rigid tethers to physical servers and toward virtualization-friendly computing infrastructures that offer more flexibility, and incidentally, power savings. Enter Citrix.

Virtual desktop infrastructures (VDI) are a good test of UCS. Though consumer-facing sites and services can really work a server, employees can be demanding in their own right. VDI platforms must be up to the task lest productivity suffers and help desks get slammed with complaints. Delivering a good desktop experience over a network — LAN or WAN — is a good way to put servers, networking and storage through their paces. Cisco, by teaming with Citrix, believes that UCS is more than ready for the challenge.

If you want more proof that ARM has data center ambitions, look no further than this article in eWeek.

During the Hot Chips conference at Stanford this week, ARM’s architecture program manager, Dave Brash, said that the Cortex A, code-named Eagle, will feature virtualization support. Already, according to Brash, companies including VMware are working hypervisors for the processor, which the company hopes will make a splash in the low-end server space. If it takes off, it could give data center operators achieve new levels of energy efficiency from their server consolidation efforts.

Timing is everything, as they say. ARM’s low-power processors are already a staple among smartphones and mobile devices, where battery life trumps just about all other considerations. Add runaway data center growth and the emergence of cloud computing, and it’s easy to see why interest in the company’s chip designs is rising among companies that are looking to keep their energy costs in check.

For instance, Facebook is rumored to be pondering a switch to an ARM-based server architecture. Microsoft is devoting some personnel to evaluating ARM’s architecture as it beefs up its data center presence in support of its cloud computing strategy (Azure). Finally, ARM has been fanning the flames somewhat by becoming one of Smooth-Stone’s most prominent backers. Smooth-Stone hopes IT shops will flock to its ARM-based, multi-processor servers that match computing workloads with just the right amount of processor power, which drives energy efficiency by eliminating a lot of the overhead incurred by traditional server designs.

When will ARM’s Eagle land? According to Brash, the company is “very, very close” to delivering the design to its partners. Read the rest of Jeffrey Burt’s eWeek article here.

How do you make a grab for a bigger slice of the virtualization market in the face of VMware’s expansive portfolio? By going in whole hog.

The software company is undergoing a product realignment, corralling all of its virtualization technologies under the Oracle Virtualization banner in a product development and branding exercise that, if all goes according to plan, will help the company snag business from the market leader. It could also determine how other providers market their wares — away from point solutions, that is.

As its new “desktop-to-datacenter” mantra suggests, Oracle is repositioning its portfolio as an integrated and interoperable suite of virtualization technologies that encompass servers, desktops, apps and storage.  Sure, IT folks may scream “vendor lock-in,” but the strategy does provide companies with a one-stop supplier for their server and IT consolidation projects. Fortunately for Oracle, it’s able to back up the move with a full-fledged slate of software — much of it from Sun, mind you. This includes Oracle VM Server, Virtual Desktop Infrastructure, Oracle VM Storage Connect and Sun Ray, among others.

Though there were doubts, it looks like Oracle’s acquisition of Sun is starting to crystallize into a real data center strategy. Let the games begin!

Today, Symantec and VMware say they are removing the last roadblock to completely virtualized server infrastructures with Symantec ApplicationHA and VirtualStore. The two companies worked together on a solution, based on Symantec’s Veritas Cluster Server and Veritas Storage Foundation, for giving IT managers the confidence to place business critical apps on virtual machines. Of course, they’ll have a lot of convincing to do.

Currently, IT administrators run into a brick wall when it comes to virtualization. Most notably, nobody wants to risk an outage (or their jobs) by placing software applications that are critical to their businesses (sales databases, for instance) on a virtual machine. It’s generally safer to dedicate physical servers to these apps or software suites. The downside, of course, is that they are installed on servers — frequently high-performance models befitting their pecking order — that consume a lot of power and data center real-estate to perform a limited role.

Now, Symantec and VMware say that they’re bringing high availability to apps within virtual machines and seamless integration with VMware’s vCenter management dash. True to its corporate IT ambitions, VirtualHA will ship with support for numerous enterprise software staples such as Oracle, SAP, SQL and Microsoft Exchange. Windows, VMware and Linux support is a given. In addition to monitoring apps and automatically restarting them when necessary, the software also provides a crucial link between apps and VMware’s VMware HA, allowing for the restart of virtual machines if they lock up or prove to be the cause of misbehaving software.

According to Symantec, ApplicationHA goes on sale next month, September 2010, with a price of $350 (USD) per virtual machine. The wait for VirtualStore is a little longer — November 2010, in fact. Pricing has not been set yet, but it will be based on a per-server model.

Looks like they have all their ducks in a row, but until IT admins are assured that it’s a sure thing, expect them to stick on their one-app-per-box approach. When more than a handful of success stories start circulating (VMworld perhaps?), that will determine when IT execs can start dreaming up ways of really slashing their server counts.

50 percent

That’s how much of SAP’s energy use is derived from renewable energy sources (solar, wind, etc.) as of this past quarter ending June 30, 2010. Kudos!

Additionally, the enterprise software maker — which also markets carbon accounting software — is reporting huge strides in improving data center energy efficiency and cutting CO2 emissions by employing virtualization and power-sipping hardware.

You can view SAP’s sustainability report online by clicking here.

According to a report in The Wall Street Journal, Microsoft’s Bob Muglia mentions that even facing VMware’s huge headstart Hyper-V is gaining marketshare. Of course, specifics are lacking, but he did let slip that it’s making substantial gains in the SMB market, which is unsurprising considering that the market’s traditionally been one of the company’s strong suits. Looks like a significant number of SMBs haven’t been taking the advice of Dell’s Erik Dithmer’s to skip virtualization tech, to Microsoft’s delight.

He also let slip this very interesting nugget captured by Eric Savitz of Barron’s:

Finding that many companies to do side-by-side adoption of MSFT’s Hyper V and VMware. In side-by-side, we have a 90% win rate, he says. What we are seeing, he says, is doing side-by-side as customers add incremental servers to existing VMware installations.

Muglia also shares an interesting statistic, revealing that roughly 20 percent of all servers shipped are virtualized. And while enterprise adoption skews higher, it still means that the vast majority of servers are likely running underutilized. But Microsoft doesn’t seem to be sweating it. Why? Azure, the software giant’s cloud computing platform.

While betting on the cloud might pay off, it’s not without its risks. In his report on Azure at GigaOM Pro (sub. req’d), Derrick Harris zeroes in on a potential speedbump to widespread adoption: trust. Can Microsoft win over customers in an arena where openness rules? That’s just one of the issues it has to wrestle with.