Is Your Data Center Ready For Virtualization?

By Chris Loeffler, Global Applications Manager, Distributed Power Solutions, Eaton Corporation

Virtualization brings the potential to deliver dramatic savings in terms of server count, footprint, power consumption and cooling requirements for data centers. For all its advantages though, virtualization also brings some unique challenges:

• Overall power consumption will be lower, but it will be highly variable.
• There will be fewer servers, but each one will be more critical than ever.
• Applications can be dynamically reallocated at will, but the support infrastructure cannot do the same.
• Data center footprint will be smaller, but overall efficiency might still be suboptimal.

The power and cooling infrastructure—which may have been quite sufficient for pre-virtualization needs— could easily become inadequate when data center performance patterns are radically altered.

The good news is that there are practical and affordable ways to address these challenges and improve data center efficiency in the process. This paper looks at some of the power-related challenges and the readily available technologies to address them.