Making WAN Optimization Part of a Green IT Strategy

Green information technology (IT) is the industry’s latest challenge. Already, there are many initiatives seeking to reduce the “carbon footprint” of IT using techniques such as data center consolidation and desktop virtualization to centralize assets, reduce costs and decrease power consumption while continuing to deliver good application performance to users and customers.

 

IT has many impacts on the environment and they all need to be considered when planning an initiative around green IT. The manufacture of computing and network equipment requires raw materials that must be mined, transported refined and transferred to high-tech facilities using a good deal of energy. Installing equipment into offices and data centers requires onsite service visits, generating CO2 emissions each time a site visit is conducted. Digging up the road to lay new services, WAN links and power feeds has its own impact. The operation of the equipment and networks, once installed, requires power, air-conditioning and support.

 

Meanwhile, centralizing resources in core data centers brings cost savings and fewer onsite visits for maintenance, but increases the power consumption and air-conditioning requirements in key data centers, often significantly. All this has to be balanced against the goals of the business and the environmental impact of high-power operations — CO2 emissions from power stations, etc.

 

There are many obvious things that can be done both to save money, as power is expensive when oil prices are high, and to reduce the carbon footprint. Some of these include switching off lights, converting to energy-saving light bulbs, turning down the building heating or turning it off when no one is in the office. In the area of IT, many organizations are now looking at centralizing resources and using desktop virtualization to reduce support and operational costs.

 

However, with centralized, virtualized network architecture, how can organizations continue to guarantee application performance to users? Fortunately, WAN optimization is a relatively mature technique that is considered a key component of most networks. Indeed, service providers are now offering it as a bundled managed service on top of their networks. Using this technology can support green business initiatives like virtualization and consolidation.

 

WAN Optimization covers many areas of network and application performance:

 

Each technique brings part of the benefit needed to successfully guarantee application performance in a virtualized, consolidated environment. Measurement and visibility provide insight into what is happening and the impact on the business. User level QoS provides guaranteed access to resources linked to business objectives. Prioritizing key applications over recreational or less critical ones is key for most “virtual desktop” applications such as Citrix or Microsoft (News - Alert) Terminal Services. Acceleration and data reduction techniques overcome limitations in the network, both bandwidth and protocol based.

 

WAN Optimization can provide the economic and green benefits of centralization and virtualization, but typically requires the installation of a “branch office box” to deliver the feature set. Clearly then, this “branch office box” approach is a step back towards the old-fashioned server everywhere design. The result is that green improvements are at least partially offset by the addition of boxes in each branch office.

 

What’s needed is a new approach — the installation of management devices in key locations; data centers, regional headquarters — everywhere compression is required. But not in sites that don’t require local compression services.

 

This some-to-any model is much more aligned with the goals of green IT (fewer devices, less power, fewer van-rolls etc.) and virtualization/centralization as it guarantees critical application performance without the need to deploy hundreds of costly energy consuming devices.

 

In the end, WAN optimization can be part of an overall green initiative, one that fits with underlying business objectives, that aligns infrastructures to applications and applications to business priorities. The key is to avoid taking steps backward into branch office services that aren’t required by using innovative techniques now available that avoid putting boxes were compression isn’t required.