1. Terry Alexander Exec Director, Office of Campus Sustainability

2.  Recent survey: approximately 200 server rooms and server closets housing thousands of servers on campus – huge concern over data security for research!  Using VaaS, we hope to gradually shutdown these inefficient spaces and consolidate services in well designed and operated data centers.  Moving to VaaS is a stepping stone to eventually moving to “cloud computing”

3.  This service provides “virtual servers” to University units for a monthly fee that includes: ◦ hardware cost ◦ life cycle replacement cost ◦ cost of support staff ◦ utilities  A small server (1 CPU, 35 GB of disk) costs about $39 a month

4.  Commonly find servers using less than 5% of their processing power  Combining multiple virtual servers on a shared physical server uses the hardware more effectively  System administrators get out of the business of supporting hardware without losing control of programs or data  Departments continue to manage the server operating system and applications, but they no longer worry about the physical box

5. An efficient data center uses about as much energy to cool and support the server as it does to power the server. – a 1:1 ratio. An inefficient data center can have ratios in the 10:1 or higher range ! For these estimates we assumed department data centers were at a very conservative 2:1 ratio.

6.  It costs too much. ◦ This is a valid concern – when pricing, need to make sure it is a reasonable cost and phase in the process - as servers die switch to virtual. We have switched approximately 200 so far – to six central servers that include backups. ◦ Server replacement is normally not accounted for at the unit level – run it until it dies and hope there is money available - $5-25k depending on server size.

7.  I lose control of my data. ◦ This is untrue – the data still resides on a server you just cannot physically touch the server! ◦ Centralized VaaS also provides continual backups of the data – something often neglected at the unit or department level!  Data retrieval is too slow over the network. ◦ This could be a valid concern if not planned properly. Theoretically could have 600-800 virtual servers on one physical machine – but it does slow down. We set limit at 400 per machine to avoid this issue.

8.  My IT manager will no longer be needed – job insecurity. ◦ Again, absolutely untrue. The central VaaS only takes care of the hardware. The unit still takes care of the software and data so IT staff will still be needed at the unit level.  Security is a concern - worm and virus attack kills everyone on the virtual server. ◦ This is untrue currently. The partitions on the server have not been breached but who knows what can happen in the future. It is far easier to protect one physical server than 400 individual ones!

9. 400 Virtual Servers: 125,320 kW/yr = 90 Metric Tons CO 2 400 Physical Servers: 1,226,400 kW/yr = 881 Metric Tons CO 2 Carbon Savings through Virtualization: 1,101,080 kW/yr = 791 Metric Tons CO 2