American Power Conversion White Paper Sample

Virtualization is brining new extremes of power density and pace of change to the data center, increasing the demands on power and cooling infrastructure and naturally raising some concern about possible effects on availability. Fortunately, the key characteristic of virtualization -- high density -- is not new, and effective strategies for supporting it have had time to develop. While virtualization carries consolidated and dynamic computing to extraordinary new levels, the basic power and cooling requirements of virtualized computing are similar to those already introduced by high-density blade servers during the past decade. As a result, technologies are available today to meet the power, cooling, and management needs of a virtualized environment.

Physical consolidation from virtualizing will always reduce power consumption -- directly, from the reduced server population and indirectly, from eliminating a portion of the power consumed by the power and cooling systems (although the latter reduction may be less than expected, as explained later). A parallel upgrade to bring power and cooling into line with the same lean philosophy as the virtualized IT layer will reduce power consumption even further -- often increasing by double (or more) the electrical savings achieved by virtualization alone.