Consolidation projects have been popular
since long before green IT was the rage. A few years ago,
considerations such as operational efficiency, centralized policy
management, reliability, and security were typically the business
drivers. But now, with almost nightly news coverage of global
warming, stricter domestic and international government
regulations, and intense public pressure on companies to adopt
environmentally friendly practices, some businesses have shown a
willingness to spend a bit more on programs that increase their
green cred.
If the initiative is such that it can be boiled down and trumpeted
in press releases, all the better.
But for most of us, the reality is that businesses still expect IT
to cut overall costs, even as they mandate greenness. The good news
is that these goals aren’t mutually exclusive. In fact, more
often than not, cost-cutting consolidation efforts result in lower
environmental impact, advancing the green mandate. E-mail is a
prime example in that it’s one of the most ubiquitous
enterprise applications. Many users and organizations consider
e-mail to be the most critical form of communication they have,
surpassing the telephone. If the PBX goes down, users will pull out
their cell phones and manage to connect with customers. But if the
corporate e-mail system falters, widespread panic generally
ensues.
So it’s no surprise that e-mail-related projects are highly
visible—particularly when something goes wrong—and not
typically where IT experiments. Still, there’s room for
innovative consolidation approaches that provide a robust e-mail
environment while reducing the number of servers, improving
reliability and service levels, and lowering costs associated with
backups and related resources such as disks or tapes. All of which
add up to a checkmark under the “green” column.
Growing
Problem
In today’s active merger and acquisition environment, many
enterprises are experiencing significant growth. As new companies
are purchased, IT is faced with the daunting task of integrating
networks, back-office systems, and front-office apps without
disrupting operations. It’s not uncommon to find companies
operating a mishmash of internal e-mail systems owned by various
subsidiaries. This type of inefficiency provides an ideal
consolidation opportunity to reduce complexity, operational costs,
and IT’s environmental footprint.
A good example of e-mail gone wild is a U.S. client we recently
helped to merge more than 20 disparate systems, including several
versions of Exchange (5.5, 2000, and 2003), Lotus Notes, and
Sendmail running on Unix and Linux, serving its 200 locations. This
client faced significant administrative and operational
inefficiencies. Maintaining an accurate company-wide address list,
even a simple task such as moving the mailbox of an employee
transferring from one division to another, became increasingly
difficult and costly. In addition, operating underutilized servers,
storage, and backup systems in multiple locations was costing too
much in hardware, licensing, and utility and energy.
The ultimate way to consolidate e-mail is to outsource the whole
thing to the cloud, using a hosted service model such as
IBM’s hosted Lotus Notes service or Microsoft’s Hosted
Exchange, or a Web-based offering such as Google’s Gmail.
However, this route is still seen by some enterprises as unproven
and insecure; recent outages experienced by Gmail users only add to
IT’s unwillingness to hand over the keys to the enterprise
e-mail kingdom.
A more attractive tactic is to learn from cloud providers and take
a similar approach internally, by consolidating e-mail operations
and providing access over the WAN or Internet. Assuming economies
of scale apply, such an internal consolidation project lets you
keep control within the organization, cut costs, and reduce your
e-mail system’s overall environmental impact.
Features available in advanced e-mail systems can be combined with
new storage, WAN optimization for high availability, and data
deduplication technologies to create a centralized e-mail system
that provides reliable operation and maintains many of the benefits
of a decentralized approach. These include fast response times and
a reasonable level of productivity for users during connectivity
disruptions; a reduced overall number of e-mail servers; and the
elimination or great reduction of the number of tapes needed for
backup.
Take A Picture
Fibre Channel or iSCSI storage may be necessary if, for example,
you need specific disk I/O performance based on user concurrency or
e-mail activity levels. But what makes a SAN attractive from a
consolidation standpoint are the storage-based snapshot or
clone-based backup capabilities offered on high-end devices from
top-tier vendors such as EMC, Hitachi Data Systems, IBM, and
NetApp, as well as smaller vendors such as Compellent.
Storage-based snapshots can be used to recover quickly when a
restore is needed, eliminating the need for daily tape-based
backups.
Even with new green initiatives aimed at creating more efficient
storage arrays, such as spinning down or turning off inactive
drives, storage continues to be a major power consumer in the data
center—up to 40% by some estimates—so it may seem
counterintuitive to say installing a storage area network can help
with your green efforts. However, it’s the high-availability
and scalability features, like hardware-based snapshots and
replication, available on modern SANs that enable the type of
massive consolidation of e-mail resources discussed here, and that
can ultimately improve efficiency and lower the overall
environmental footprint in environments large enough to reap the
full benefits of consolidation.
Of course, from a green perspective, even a consolidated backup
system is far from zero footprint, so it’s vital to reduce
the amount of data that must be stored and the resources required
to send mail across the enterprise. In our extended Green IT
report, at greencomputing.informationweek.com,we discuss in much
more depth data deduplication and WAN optimization
technologies.