 For TechSoup Global—a nonprofit organization that brings technological empowerment and product donations to social benefit organizations around the globe—the move to blade servers has had a considerable impact:
- Nearly $25,000 annual savings in server administration time.
- $40,000 in cost avoidance concerning an HVAC upgrade.
- 99 percent faster server deployment.
- 72 percent reduction in data center power usage.
- 78 servers consolidated to eight.
- Server room temperature lowered from 85 degrees to 70 degrees.
“We saved 220 hours of system administration time in the first three months,” says Tim Suttle, Director of IS infrastructure at TechSoup Global. “Managing our new server and storage environment is like night and day compared with our previous systems.”
Server sprawl, aging Dell equipment and a generous donation of collocation space led TechSoup Global to consider a virtual environment for cost savings and efficiency—both at its new data center and at its San Francisco headquarters, where TechSoup Global still runs many of its core infrastructure applications and conducts testing and development.
The company contracted Dasher Technologies, Inc., an HP Partner, to install two HP BladeSystem c3000 enclosures—one for the collocation facility and one for headquarters—as well as 10 HP ProLiant BL460c server blades with quad core processors. Since the c3000 enclosure (a.k.a. “Shorty”) runs on standard 110-volt power, TechSoup Global saved $5,000 by not having to install 220-volt power for the server racks in its headquarters facility.
For storage, the nonprofit has two 3PAR InServ E200 Storage Servers, one for each site, and uses the iSCSI protocol to connect them to the network. TechSoup Global is also taking advantage of an HP StorageWorks MSL2024 tape library.
Virtualization leads to consolidation, heat reduction
TechSoup Global consolidated 18 physical servers onto four BL460c server blades in its new collocation environment. The organization is now seeking similar efficiencies at its San Francisco headquarters, where Suttle expects to see space savings and performance gains by consolidating most of the facility’s 60 servers onto the HP BladeSystem. “In almost all of the systems we’ve virtualized, we’ve seen an improvement in performance as well as a reduction in the use of physical RAM,” he says.
The server consolidation not only reduced the environmental impact of TechSoup’s computing footprint, but also addressed an immediate business need. One of the server rooms at headquarters was regularly overheating, often forcing IT staff to proactively power down non-critical systems to keep the temperature stable.
“We were consistently up around 85 degrees Fahrenheit,” says Suttle. “We started bringing in portable air conditioning units and tons of fans—anything and everything we could do to cool it down.”
The first step in the physical-to-virtual migration involved targeting servers with the worst heat output and power consumption and moving them to virtual machines. By doing so, TechSoup Global has achieved a 72 percent reduction in power usage at its San Francisco data center.
“We’re down around 70 degrees in the server room now, and we expect to get lower than that,” says Suttle. “As a result, we no longer have the corresponding availability issues. Also, without virtualization we would have required a $40,000 retrofit and upgrade of the HVAC unit.”
HP BladeSystem c-Class solutions like the c3000 enclosure feature embedded HP Thermal Logic technology designed to reduce energy usage and associated costs. “We can see power utilization and draw for all of our blades from a single management pane. In the past, we would have had to attain and monitor such information at each individual server,” Suttle says. |
Printable version