Did you know you can decrease your impact on the environment by hosting with CIFNet?

Virtualization technology reduces data center space, heating and cooling, and energy costs. One can easily stack hundreds of virtual machines on a single physical server host. With guaranteed resource allocation – i.e. without compromising the performance of either one of these virtual machines at the expense of those that consume more, it is an efficient use of resources. By doing this many times over we were able to reduce our overall server count dramatically. Also, by deploying highly redundant well-built servers (ECC memory, redundant power supplies), we were able to minimize most typical hardware outages caused by the failure of hardware components such as fans, PSUs, and memory.

Further, by centralizing and consolidating our storage to Storage Area Network with SAS disks in RAID, we were able to significantly improve redundancy and scalability for the storage. All of our SAN appliances have redundant power supplies, as well as redundant RAID controllers. In the event of the hard disk failure, we will be able to hot-swap the failing drive with the spare and continue operating without any impact on the data.

The math:

A typical rack with 30 servers consumes anywhere from 30 to 40 amps or 3.450 to 4.6 kW, accordingly (multiply previously mentioned figures by ~115 volts).

Our typical host machine consumes about 3 amps or 345 watts. Our storage appliance, when fully populated with drives, consumes about 6 amps or 690 watts. However, we only need about four (4) host machines plus a storage appliance to replace approximately three (3) racks of legacy gear (p3, celeron, and even some p4 type of machines). Virtualization technology (4 servers + storage) requires about 3*4+6= 18 amps, or 345watts per server * 4 servers + 690 watts for storage = 2070 watts = 2.07kW. In retrospect, 3 racks of legacy equipment consume 105 amps (~35 amps per rack) or 12.075kW.

If we compare the two figures, 12.075kW vs 2.07kW, we can state that virtualized technology is 5.83 times more efficient in terms of power than the legacy infrastructure. Furthermore, if we take into the account the time, energy, and resources (including human resources) to fix the previous monolithic (read-inefficient) infrastructure, virtualization technology surely wins on many counts.

Please note, the number of host servers for virtualization may be adjusted up or down.

Our "Green" project is ongoing, as we continually seek to find new ways to impove performance of our VPS cloud, we will continue to update this page.