Seventy-six per cent of executives surveyed at the MIT Sloan CIO Symposium in May 2008 said they didn't have a committed budget for a greening policy, even though 90 percent said that greening their data centers is crucial to meeting their companies' business objectives. This wasn't the case for Avnet Inc., $14 billion worldwide distributor of electronic components, computer products, and technology services. In fact, Avnet received Computerworld's Best Practices in Green IT Award for a three-year project to create a more energy-efficient data center.

Avnet's 13,000 square foot data center houses 1,200 logical servers, more than 200 terabytes of disk storage, a central tape backup system, and redundant UPSs, generators, and switch gear. For Brad Kenney, vice president of infrastructure at Avnet, the greening of the company's data center wasn't another IT project, but an on-going process that has saved the company thousands of dollars in unnecessary power consumption, under-utilized servers, and inefficient UPSs. He says, "Most of all it's saved us the millions of dollars it would cost to build out our data center to house more servers we didn't need."

Kenney begin the process by looking at every piece of equipment on the data center floor. Two important factors included the age of the device and its energy efficiency. Because manufacturers have become more concerned about energy consumption, Kenney found it more cost-effective to replace older air conditioners and older UPSs with new devices that were at least 20 percent more energy efficient. He even looked at replacing floor tiles, lighting, and making adjustments in air handling. He says that little things like these can save up to 30 percent in energy consumption.

Server virtualization enabled Kenney to liquidate about 300 severs. Twenty-four physical ESX hosts now represent 378 virtual servers, and 39 AIX servers have more than 200 servers on them. Other consolidated efforts include moving to a centralized tape backup system and a storage area network.

Kenney is also amazed by the improved energy consumption that has resulted from virtualization, as well as from the other system consolidations. He says, "We went down by 44 percent in kWs per server. We've freed up more than 5,000 square feet on the data center floor."

Bio
Since 2004, Brad Kenney has been vice president of IT infrastructure at Avnet Inc., where he oversees the data center facility, computer operations, desktops, data storage, networks, messaging, and mainframes. Kenney started his career with Avnet in 1987 and has served in a variety of positions, including supervisor, manager, and director of data center operations. He received a B.S. in Computer Information Systems from Arizona State University.

Resources
The Data Center Journal - Blade.org Establishes Venture Capital Advisory Board to Guide Blade Standard and Future Solutions
Purchasing.com - Avnet Gets Green Certification
ChannelWeb - Avnet Adds Virtualization to Growing Services Portflio

Production Credits
Elizabeth Ferrarini, Executive Producer
Tom Parish, Host and Audio Producer
AlarmMusic.com Production Music Library for Broadcast, Film, Video & Post Production

Like many large companies, Sybase, with $1 billion in revenues, has eliminated millions of dollars of unnecessary IT costs in the past few years. This data company has gone from 30 global centers down to three consolidated data centers. Jim Swartz, Sybase's CIO and vice president, says, "Our mantra is to simplify, to standardize, and to consolidate." The primary data center now resides at the corporate headquarters.

However, Sybase has an aggressive plan to keep IT costs down by going green. In fact, Jim Swartz, CIO of Sybase, says that initiatives, such as server virtualization, service oriented architecture, retiring and redeploying servers, temporary storage of the OS, and improved cooling, could postpone the building of a new data center until 2017. Swartz says, "About a year ago, we realized that we were going to run out of power and cooling in the near future unless we did something. We looked for clever ways to solve the problem rather than to spend upwards of $10 million to retrofit or to build a brand new data center."

In this podcast, Jim Swartz, CIO and vice president of Sybase, describes his company's green program for the entire enterprise.

Bio
Jim Swartz is chief information officer and vice president of Sybase, where he oversees a team of IT professionals who provide applications and computing support to worldwide business and engineering units. Before Sybase, Swartz was CIO at SRI International and at Science Applications International Corporation. He has been a member of the California Information Technology Commission, providing recommendations on policy and technology issues to the State Department of Information Technology.

Resources
Sybase Touts Software as a Service
Interop

Wireless Enterprise

Information Liquidity Sybase

Production Credits
Elizabeth Ferrarini, Executive Producer
Tom Parish, Host and Audio Producer
5AlarmMusic.com, Production Music Library for Broadcast, Film, Video & Post Production