Sandia National Laboratories, a multi-program laboratory managed by Sandia, has been presented with a 2012 Department of Energy Sustainability Award. The company received this award for its energy management of computer servers.
Sandia received this award in the energy management category for its initiatives to deploy virtual servers that have reduced costs and energy use and averted pollution by minimizing equipment acquirements, operations and disposal.
Standard physical computer servers have 10% to 15% efficiency and yet they need 100% power and cooling. Sandia, over the four years, moved to wider server virtualization by means of a “virtual first” policy and maximized energy efficiency. It deployed over 700 virtual servers, covering its multiple sites and six network partitions. The company’s current hardware can hold almost 100 virtual servers on each separate physical host server. These host servers operate together, nearly 100% of the time, in order to level the loads on virtual servers by linking physical host servers with virtualization clusters using software. The design also includes a reserve margin so that when a crash occurs, other servers will take up the slack and make the whole system more reliable.
Server virtualization led to roughly $3.4 million in total hardware savings and net electricity savings of approximately 7.6 billion BTUs per year for further cost savings of over $200,000 annually. It also eliminated the requirement to regularly upgrade and get rid of old servers.
John Zepper, Sandia’s Computing and Network Services Center director, and Laura Lenberg, from the Infrastructure Computing Services department, received the award at a ceremony in Washington, DC.
The project also won a Pollution Prevention Best in Class award from National Nuclear Security Administration of the U.S. Department of Energy in April 2012.
Source: http://www.sandia.gov/