Executive summary .............................................. 2The challenge of a complex data center .................. 2The network effect ................................................ 2Green data center best practices .......................... 3Power and cooling utilization ................................. 3Building efficient infrastructures ............................. 4Environmental Sustainability .................................. 5Why ProCurve ..................................................... 5For more information ............................................ 6

Green networking in the data center White paper

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Executive summary Today, advanced technology ecosystems are what fuel business. This surge of technology is one that presents new capabilities but greater challenges as companies look to meet their business needs. However, this comes with an increasing impact on the environment in which we live. Over the past thirty years, increased awareness of our effect on the environment has developed into a “green” movement toward more economic and environmental sustainability. In response to this growing need, governmental agencies around the world are working to define and enforce regulations to help mitigate the inefficient use of natural resources and reduce hazardous waste disposal. Following suit, companies across the business landscape are adopting progressive “social responsibility” guidelines, including eco-friendliness, as key elements of their overall business objectives and are promoting green initiatives. For example, tariffs on Carbon Footprint and utility costs (power and cooling) are now evaluated as part of the Total Cost of Ownership of a particular design and vendor choice.

This movement toward greater environmental concern impacts every department and function in a company and IT is no exception. Many industry analysts, such as Gartner, have cited “Green IT” as a primary technology driver for the IT industry¹. The data center is one area of particular interest for IT departments looking to reduce their environmental footprint. According to the EPA Report to Congress on Server and Data Center Efficiency, the powering and cooling of data center equipment is estimated to account for up to 1.5% of all electricity consumed in the United States². Thus making efficiency in the data center a top priority that can result in not only a significant cost savings, but also reduce the impact on the environment.

This paper provides an overview of the challenges faced in today’s data centers; addressing the issues surrounding data center power, cooling and efficiency, with an emphasis on how specific networking tools and strategies can help address these issues. It will also highlight the HP ProCurve data center solutions that focus on efficiency in the data center and the benefits they provide.

The challenge of a complex data center The job of a CIO is a constant challenge as their organizations are increasingly asked to shift from being a cost center to a key business enabler. Strategically, companies look to technology to drive business growth

and gain a competitive advantage. Fiscally, they’re continuously challenged to reduce cost – even as the business expands while energy and other operational costs spiral upward. Internally, they are challenged to mitigate risk and provide better security for data centers and business data. As a result, data centers in particular are reaching their limit of management, infrastructure, energy, cooling and space resources. According to HP’s 2008 Data Center Transformation Survey, more than one-third of chief information officers believe that in two to five years their data centers will be unable to meet the rapidly growing demands of business services and applications³.

If you’re running an IT organization, these issues have serious implications. They can jeopardize your ability to meet new business demands – creating a barrier for growth, inhibiting efforts to meet increasing expectations for your “always on” customers, employees and vendors. The negative business impact of data center downtime and the increasing speed and unpredictability of business changes put a premium on application availability and data center flexibility.

In many cases, constraints on available utility power, cooling capacity, and physical space in a company’s data center facility impose serious limitations on an IT department’s ability to deliver key services. In these circumstances, “going green” in the data center is not just about social responsibility, it is a business imperative. By focusing on methods to reduce power usage and efficiency, companies can reduce operational expenses and lower the risk of outgrowing current facilities, while simultaneously minimizing their environmental footprints.

The Network EffectData centers are the central component of a business and need powerful, secure, enterprise networking solutions to help efficiently run it. Traditionally, networking equipment has not been a major contributor to the power consumption problems of the data center. However, seen as a unique platform among IT infrastructures, networking bridges the gap between facilities and IT.

Now, more than ever, it is essential for the server and networking industry to work hand in hand to solve the complex challenges of the data center and to ensure that they are compatible with the emerging best practices of server and storage utilization. Taking the appropriate steps to minimize power consumption can increase utilization rates of server and storage assets resulting in power and space reductions in the data center and help meet high-level business goals.

¹ “Gartner identifies the Top 10 Strategic Technologies for 2008”, Gartner, 2007 ² “EPA Report to Congress on Server and Data Center Energy Efficiency”, 2007 ³ HP 2008 Data Center Transformation Survey, Pen, Schoen and Berland, February 2008.

Did you know? U.S. data center electricity use has more than doubled since 200, amounting to about $4.1 billion in electricity costs, and estimated at about 59 billion kilowatt-hours (’06).

• This is more than the electricity consumed by the nation’s color televisions.

• And roughly equal to the amount used by over 5,000,000 U.S. households.

Source: U.S. Department of Energy, 2007

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Green data center best practicesMoving toward a green data center requires a delicate balance of utilization power and cooling and building efficient infrastructures in order to promote a green environment. To understand how to accomplish this, it is important to understand how assets in the data center have traditionally been deployed. In the past, when a new application was deployed, in many cases the deployment team would provision a new set of server and storage elements that would be dedicated to that application, and that application alone. While that had certain advantages in terms of isolating the development and testing of each individual application, there were two major disadvantages:

• In many cases, each application deployment team chose hardware they felt to be optimal for their unique needs. However, over time this lead to a widely disparate set of equipment that was difficult for data center administrators to maintain in a consistent manner.

• A greater impact from a space and power efficiency standpoint was that this approach often led to extremely underutilized assets. Vendors have said average server utilization rates in data centers hover between 5% and 15%4

In order to help businesses overcome the energy and capacity limitations, operational vulnerabilities, and IT constraints that limit today’s data center, there are three general keys to successful green data center initiatives:

• Power and cooling – In order to optimize utility cost structures, adopting next generation power and cooling architectures such as consistent front to back cooling, hot/cold aisle, smart cooling and placing your data center in an optimal location can prove a significant data center cost savings.

• Building efficient infrastructures – In order to ensure that the server and storage assets are utilized to their fullest extent; businesses need to use technologies that enable virtualization with blades, multiple CPU’s etc. Switch technologies are also needed to improve utilization technology to advance increased performance per kW of power consumed.

• Environmental responsibility – HP and HP ProCurve Networking helps you address your green IT needs through energy-efficient solutions for the data center and beyond. ProCurve looks to help businesses reduce environmental impact while helping you meet demanding technology challenges.

Power and cooling utilization In order to best assess how networking can impact the overall power consumption in the data center, it is important to understand how much power is

consumed by networking equipment itself. In an Ovum survey on power consumption in the data center, results proved that power usage was an Industry wide concern accounting for 2-3% of Opex5.

Power consumption in the data center can be separated into two general categories. One classified as power consumed by the server, networking, and storage devices themselves, which we will refer to herein as equipment power. This power is largely converted to heat given off by data center equipment. As a result, the second category of power in the data center, cooling power, is needed to remove this heat from the data center environment. Keeping data center equipment sufficiently cooled has always posed a challenge, but is even more difficult today with the advent of high-density, multi-core computing platforms such as blade server enclosures. In order to address these cooling challenges, a number of common best practices have evolved.

Perhaps the most common method in use today to cool large data centers is the concept of a “hot aisle/cold aisle” physical layout. A key objective of such layouts is to prevent the mixing of hot and cold air prior to passing over the equipment to be cooled. This is achieved by directing airflow from the front to the back of the equipment racks, and sealing the gaps within and between racks in order to maintain a pressure differential between the cold and hot aisles.

An important element for enabling efficient hot aisle/cold aisle layouts is ensuring that all equipment in a rack, including networking switches, has front-to-back fan cooling. The ProCurve Switch 6600 series comes equipped with reversible fan trays such that airflow can be directed across the switch from the front to the back of the rack, regardless of the orientation (ports facing front or ports facing back). Front-to-back airflow is also useful for alternative cooling architectures, such as “chimney” designs where the exhaust air from a small number of equipment racks is directly vented to the ceiling and returns to the air conditioning system.

To reduce the power consumed by its devices, the ability to power off unused switch ports is a feature found in the HP ProCurve Switch 6600 series. In addition, the migration to SFP+ form factor devices for 10Gbps transceivers results in a power savings of up to 75% per 10Gbps connection.

Another key objective for efficient cooling of data center equipment is the elimination of “hot spots” within the data center. These local hot spots typically result from high levels of server utilization within a small footprint, often during peak usage periods. Fortunately, a virtualized environment provides the means to more easily move server workloads within the data center to reduce server utilization, or to

4 “Top 10 ways to save energy in the data center,” Shamus McGilliCuddy, SearchCIO.com, November 29, 2007 5 Increased Focus on Network Power Consumption to Lower Opex, Go Green, TMCnews.com, April 2008.

Server Edge Network(Top of Rack/End of Row)

Core and DistributionNetwork

8200zl series5400zl series

6600 series5400zl series

Webservers

Appservers

DBservers

Automated Network ProvisioningData Center Connection Manager

SSL, XML acc.Load balancing

Application security*

Applicationdelivery controllers*

WAN*WANaccelerators

*HP ProCurve ONE applications

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areas within the data center that have excess cooling capacity. To help facilitate these moves, it is important to have accurate temperature readings throughout the data center. HP thermal zone mapping technology provides the data center administrator with information on temperatures at various points within the data center, so that workloads can be directed to cooler areas as necessary.

As part of its Data Center Transformation initiative, HP Services, through its Critical Facilities Services group, provides a wide variety of services to help customers minimize their power and space requirements. HP design solutions examine facility infrastructures, balancing energy-efficiency issues with solutions that identify concerns such as reliability, scalability, maintainability, schedule and cost. These solutions leverage high-density cooling, power and energy-reduction design strategies to optimize space, performance and efficiency.

Building efficient infrastructures The move toward server virtualization has had an impact on network operations in the data center, as it relates to security and provisioning. As a result, demand for more flexible and adaptive application environments challenges existing organizational structures and workflow processes, forcing new paradigms in data center design. However, the fact remains that networking equipment and power usage is not a primary consumer of data center power. Much greater significance lies in how networking elements and design can enable greater utilization rates for servers, which comprise the vast majority of equipment power consumed in data centers.

Virtualization has emerged as a leading innovative technology that improves server efficiency and utilization rates. According to a study by Gartner, data centers that did not use virtualization had an average server CPU utilization rate of only 15%. By contrast, data centers that have adopted virtualization techniques have seen server utilization rates climb to 60% and 75%, representing 4x the amount of usable server capacity from the same server infrastructure, with only a modest increase in power consumption.

With such dramatic increases in server utilization made possible by virtualization, it is clear that networking products and features that simplify or improve the ability to implement a virtualized environment are key contributors to a greener data center. In an effort to help customers reap the benefits of virtualization, HP ProCurve offers provisioning tools such as the Data Center Connection Manager (DCM), which provides network administrators the means to develop and maintain an inventory of virtual network connections that allow server administrators with fast, secure provisioning for both physical and virtual servers. HP has recently launched the HP ProLiant BL685c Server Blade, the first AMD G6 Blade and the HP ProLiant DL320 G6 Server, designed to minimize power consumption, maximize virtualization potential and get the most out of your budget. In addition, eight HP ProCurve switches were recently awarded the Certified Green award by MierCom, an independent testing lab – significantly outperforming the networking industry in energy efficiency and environmental sustainability.“ HP Virtual Connect is a family of products that simplifies both data and storage network provisioning, allowing system administrators the ability to more easily move both physical and virtual

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servers within an HP BladeSystem environment. These HP networking products work in concert with server management tools such as HP Insight Dynamics to provide customers with the means to monitor, plan, provision, and deploy server resources in a logical, consistent manner across both virtual and physical assets to help enable a green data center.

A complex ecosystem, the data center holds substantial management challenges for businesses. Green initiatives are no different and are never limited to a single vendor. HP ProCurve recognizes this and looks to provide customers a wide variety of solutions from industry-leading vendors through the HP ProCurve Open Network Ecosystem (ONE). As a ProCurve ONE alliance partner, F5 Networks offers a family of products that provide more effective use of the server resources through intelligent load balancing and offloading to help reduce the number of servers required. Another ONE partner, Riverbed offers Steelhead appliances and client software that enables environmentally-friendly practices like telecommuting and distributing office locations through WAN optimization.

With an extensive portfolio of efficient data center solutions, HP provides efficient network design elements to overcome the energy and capacity limitations, operational vulnerabilities and technology constraints that can plague your data center. Choosing from a portfolio of solutions matched to fit your business needs, transform your data center into a business-driven, process-smart and future-ready asset through the following:

• Energy efficiency analysis — Includes services to compare your energy usage with industry best practice, identify sources of inefficiency, recommend improvement measures and provide improvement cost/benefit estimates.

• Computational fluid dynamics analysis — Sophisticated tools and techniques analyze the thermal conditions in your data center to assess and adjust for improving cooling performance and energy consumption.

• Energy Efficiency Design Services – HP design solutions examine the facility infrastructure, balancing energy-efficiency issues with concerns such as reliability, scalability, maintainability, schedule and cost.

Environmental sustainability HP has been a leader in environmental responsibility for decades. Our efforts to innovate and design for the environment represent a long-standing commitment

rather than a recent trend. Global Citizenship has been a core company objective for HP since the 1950s. In addition, HP has spearheaded electronics recycling programs since the 1980s, and under that program over 250 million pounds of electronics products have been recycled in 2007 alone. In the early 1990s, HP also initiated a “Design for the Environment” program across the entire company.

HP is committed to reducing its own environmental impact as well as those around them through joint research and collaboration to shape public policy for recycling, energy consumption and climate change. Through aggressive trade-in programs, HP is consciously maintaining the product end-of-life program, with collection and recycling totals of 250 million pounds of electronic products and supplies met in the first half of 2007. In promoting standards and improving efficiency, HP has also consolidated its own 83 data centers to 6.

In order to build a green data center and overcome the energy and capacity limitations, operational vulnerabilities, and IT constraints that limit today’s data center, you need a solution that has those same goals in mind. As technology speeds ahead, HP practices what we preach and will continue its commitment to global citizenship, planning to reduce the power consumption of their own operations by 20 percent by 2010.

Why HP ProCurve?Businesses look to a virtualized data center to help businesses grow, innovate and remain competitive. Green initiatives are integral in helping adapt to these challenges. Your network should make it easy to evolve and conform to power-efficiency standards and technology improvements as they occur. HP ProCurve’s portfolio includes energy-efficient products, solutions, and services to reduce network complexity and enable green IT.

Aligned with HP’s data center transformation initiatives, ProCurve’s data center solutions are based on ProCurve’s Adaptive Network vision – to boost competitiveness, fortify security, increase productivity and reduce complexity of a network by being adaptive to users, applications and organizations’ needs. HP ProCurve data center products and solutions offer:

• Choice and flexibility: ProCurve provides consistency and interoperability across existing network investments and leverages the capabilities of best-in-class application providers to help improve performance and manage cost.

Technology for better business outcomes

To learn more, visit www.hp.com/go/procurve© Copyright 2009 Hewlett-Packard Development Company, L.P. The information contained herein is subject to change without notice. The only warranties for HP products and services are set forth in the express warranty statements accompanying such products and services. Nothing herein should be construed as constituting an additional warranty. HP shall not be liable for technical or editorial errors or omissions contained herein.

4AA2-6340ENW, May 2009

• Automation: ProCurve offers policy-based automated provisioning with auditable, visible and accountable processes.

• Control: ProCurve solutions provide provisioning technologies that formalize workflow activities and provide a consistent network management interface with seamless end-to-end connectivity.

• Green initiative: ProCurve data center solutions support state-of-the-art facility cooling architectures, built-in power save options and virtualization methodologies that promote higher server utilization rates, reducing both the power and space requirements in the data center.

• Operational expense management: ProCurve is attractive in terms of both acquisition and maintenance costs – solutions help to reduce the complexity of planning, deploying, and managing with most products backed by ProCurve’s industry-leading warranty.

• Advanced technology: ProCurve’s extensive product line is engineered to HP quality standards, with many powered by ProVision ASICs, including ProCurve’s family of datacenter offerings, which enable next-generation data centers. Most products are backed by ProCurve’s industry-leading warranty, service, support and training. In addition, through its Open Networking Ecosystem (ONE) ProCurve enables customers environmentally responsible, best-in-class applications and services for their network.

ProCurve’s data center solutions provide consistency and interoperability across existing network investments to help reduce network complexity. Dedicated to providing advanced networking solutions, Procurve and HP strive to lead and promote environmental sustainability and a greener data center through environmentally sounds products and services.

For more informationTo find out more about the joint HP ProCurve Networking solutions, visit www.procurve.com/one