Environment, Computing and Energy Efficiency: How Virtualization Can Contribute to Reduce the Carbon Footprint of Today's Computing Mohsen Mojabi Submitted to the Graduate Committee of School of Computing and Technology in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Technology in Information Technology Eastern Mediterranean University February 2014 Gazimağusa, North Cyprus
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Environment, Computing and Energy Efficiency - How Virtualization Can Contribute to Reduce the Carbon Footprint of Today's Computing
Thesis for Master's Degree (M. Tech.) in Information Technology Published: February 2014, North Cyprus
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Environment, Computing and Energy Efficiency:
How Virtualization Can Contribute to Reduce the
Carbon Footprint of Today's Computing
Mohsen Mojabi
Submitted to theGraduate Committee of School of Computing and Technology
in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Degree of
Master of Technologyin
Information Technology
Eastern Mediterranean UniversityFebruary 2014
Gazimağusa, North Cyprus
Approval of the Graduate Committee of School of Computing and Technology
Assoc. Prof. Dr. Mustafa İlkanDirector
We certify that we have read this project and that in our opinion it is fully adequate in scope andquality as a project for the degree of Master of Technology in Information Technology.
Asst. Prof. Dr. Ersun İşçioğluSupervisor
Examining Committee
1. Assoc. Prof. Dr. Mustafa İlkan
2. Asst. Prof. Dr. Alper Doğanalp
3. Asst. Prof. Dr. Ersun İşçioğlu
I
ABSTRACT
The mankind has faced many new phenomena over the course of last couple of
decades. One, for sure, is the IT revolution. One cannot even imagine a world
without computers on each desk nowadays; and that’s not the whole picture. The
need for huge back-end computing has led to proliferation of huge data-centers.
Although the move towards Cloud Computing has already been started for couple of
years now, there are still so many companies and large enterprises which rely solely
on their own server rooms. But what about the other phenomenon the world is just
facing nowadays: “Global Warming” as a consequence to the increase in carbon
dioxide emissions created by power plants. Everyday scientists and manufacturers
are working hard to find a new method/technique to reduce the energy consumption
of consumer electronic devices, in order to reduce what is known as “carbon
footprint” of that device, but what about desktop computers and servers? Aside from
all that’s been done for decreasing their energy consumption, is there a new way to
progress even further down this road? In this project, we are going to discuss how
virtualization can influence the new way of computing, and how drastically it can
decrease the carbon footprint of computing, both on front-end (Desktop
Virtualization) and back-end (Server Virtualization).
Keywords: Virtualization, Server Virtualization, Hardware Virtualization, Green
Computing, Energy Consumtion Efficiency, Carbon Footprint, Carbon Footprint
Reduction, Global Warming, Computing Environmental Impact.
II
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to thank Asst. Prof. Dr. Ersun Iscioglu for his continuous support and
guidance in the preparation of this study. Without his invaluable supervision, all my
efforts could have been short-sighted.
I also would like to thank Assoc. Prof. Dr. Mustafa İlkan, Director of the School of
Computing and Technology, Eastern Mediterranean University.
III
To my late father
IV
TABLE OF CONTENTS
ABSTRACT ............................................................................................................. I
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS........................................................................................ II
Now, following conservative consolidation ratios will be considered for each
business type
Table 4.3: Server consolidation ratios for each business type
Business TypeConsolidation
Ratio
Server CountBefore
Virtualization
Server CountAfter
Virtualization
Small 2 3 1+1
Medium 3 9 3
Large 4 20 5
Enterprise 5 75 15
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Note that for the small business, only two servers are virtualized into one server and
one is left untouched (e.g. consolidating less utilized server like DHCP, DNS and
Active Directory Server into one physical server, but leaving the Finance Application
Server which also contains Database Server untouched)
Table 4.4: Post-virtualization total carbon footprint
BusinessType
ServerCount
ServerType
ServerUtilization
due toIncreaseof Load
PowerUsage atthe new
UtilizationRate
kWhUsed in
FourYears of
Operation
LifeStage
CarbonFootprint(CO2eq)
CarbonFootprintReduction
(CO2eq) dueto
virtualization
%
Small 1+1ML110
G510% +20%
97 + 101 6,938 5,995 2,832 32
Medium 3DL380
G730% 116 12,194 10,371 13,210 48.3
Large 5DL580
G540% 322 56,414 48,258 121,613 71.6
Enterprise 15BL280c
G650% 1938 1,018,613 856,668 2,169,161 71.7
Finally, after servers are virtualized and consolidated into less physical servers, based
on how many servers are consolidated into one physical server, assuming 10%
utilization for each server, the new utilization is calculated based on multiplying the
virtual server count on each physical host into 10% utilization, and then based on the
power consumption ratios provided by SPEC, the new whole life-stage carbon
footprint is again calculated, and then compared to pre-virtualization results. As it
can be seen in the charts, drastic reduction in carbon footprint is shown, ranging
between 32 to 71 percent.
31
Fig. 4.5: Results for Small/Medium/Large Businesses
Fig. 4.6: Results for Enterprise Business
0.0
20,000.0
40,000.0
60,000.0
80,000.0
100,000.0
120,000.0
140,000.0
160,000.0
180,000.0
Small Medium Large
Pre Virtualization Life StageCarbon Footprint (CO2eq)
Post-Virtualization Life StageCarbon Footprint (CO2eq)
Carbon Footprint Reduction(CO2eq) due to Virtualization
3,025,829.0
856,668.2
2,169,161.0
0.0
500,000.0
1,000,000.0
1,500,000.0
2,000,000.0
2,500,000.0
3,000,000.0
3,500,000.0
Pre Virtualization LifeStage Carbon Footprint
(CO2eq)
Post-Virtualization LifeStage Carbon Footprint
(CO2eq)
Carbon FootprintReduction (CO2eq) due to
Virtualization
32
Fig. 4.7: Total Carbon Footprint Reduction in Each Business Type
Small
Medium
Large
Enterprise
0.0 20.0 40.0 60.0 80.0
Carbon Footprint Reduction (%)
33
Chapter 5
CONCLUSION
By conducting a sample case study on four types of typical business types –ranging
from small to enterprise- it was tried to give an approximation of the minimum of
carbon footprint reduction the virtualization technology can bring. As seen in the
case studies, a minimum of 32 percent of total carbon footprint reduction would be
resulted by [partially] implementing and leveraging virtualization into a small
business, and the numbers will drastically improve as the businesses grow and
consolidation ratio increases; in a way that a typical enterprise can reduce its carbon
footprint more than 70 percent. As Virtualization can be implemented in many
different ways, this project certainly cannot study all of implementation methods. But
from this study which can illustrate some typical implementations, it can clearly be
observed how virtualization technology is able to contribute to reducing the carbon
footprint. This study also tried to emphasize on the fact that the power (electricity)
consumption is not the only consequence of computing, and even if all the power is
generated by sustainable/clean energy sources like solar-panel power, wind turbines,
and hydro-electricity, the manufacturing/transportation and then decommissioning
and recycling the computing devices leaves its footprint on the environment. So, as
virtualization will enable businesses to prolong their use of their hardware
investments, not only they will have increased ROI on their IT investments, they will
also help environment by producing less electronics-waste in a certain period of time.
As environmental situation is getting worse on this planet, and the magnitude of the
harm we cause to the nature –one of them be the computing- is growing every day,
34
reduction of carbon/environmental footprint to the fullest is the only way to slow the
pace of global warming; and virtualization is undoubtedly one of the best and most
effective answers and solutions to this issues. Further studies need to be done by the
help of hardware manufacturers to better measure and quantify the effectiveness of
virtualization technology in reducing the environmental footprint of computing,
which in turn, push businesses to increase their pace of adopting Virtualization and
Cloud Computing, and motivate governments to enforce more strict rules and
regulations, and through incentives/tax-reduction/etc. motivate more businesses to
shift towards greener computing.
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