Punahou School cuts energy costs by 60 percent through server virtualization on IBM System x

Punahou School is a coeducational college preparatory day school in Honolulu, Hawai`i. With 3,750 students in grades Kindergarten to 12, it is the largest independent school on a single campus in the United States. Punahou School has a long-standing reputation for academic and athletic excellence, and many notable alumni, including current U.S. President Barack Obama.

As part of a campuswide sustainability initiative, Punahou School has set aggressive targets for reducing energy consumption: 25 percent by 2010 and 50 percent by 2016. The efforts have added economic benefit. Electricity generation in Hawai`i is dependent on imported fuel, and the price per kilowatt hour (kWh) is significantly higher than elsewhere in the U.S. With a growing estate of physical servers in its data center, the school was seeing significant increases in the cost of powering and cooling its key IT systems.

Wendi Kamiya, CIO of Punahou School, comments: “Living and working on an island, we can see in a single sweep the whole ecosystem from the mountains down to the sea—this gives us a keener awareness of the limited resources available to us. Technology is an ideal arena for demonstrating what’s achievable in terms of sustainability, and we were keen to play our part in meeting Punahou’s overall campus commitments to reducing energy consumption.”


Introducing virtualization

Punahou School’s server infrastructure had grown rapidly, going from 10 to 50 physical machines over the course of five years. This growth was caused by a significant expansion in IT services to staff and students—in particular, the decision to provide laptops for 2,300 students. In most cases, each physical server was running just a single application, and the average utilization of computer resources and storage was low.

Says Wendi Kamiya, “As we ran out of rack space, cooling and power, it became harder to respond rapidly to new functional requirements, and operational costs were rising fast. We had added as much cooling as we could, both ambient and directional, and there was a risk of the servers overheating if any of our cooling units were to fail.”

Aiming to reduce energy consumption, enable greater flexibility and minimize risk, Punahou School invited several major IT vendors to propose a new infrastructure. The winning proposal, from IBM and Commercial Data Systems (CDS), an IBM Business Partner, was to implement four IBM System x3850 M2 servers running VMware virtualization software.

“The key selling point for IBM System x® over competing options from other vendors was its advanced power management capabilities,” says Wendi Kamiya. “We had identified power consumption as a major element in our TCO projections, and the x3850 M2 servers gave us a real edge in minimizing that. Another positive factor in the IBM proposal was the technical expertise present in their Hawai`i office.”


Efficiency for cost reduction

IBM and CDS implemented the four x3580 M2 servers and helped Punahou School to virtualize 40 of its existing physical servers to run as virtual servers on VMware. The school plans to virtualize the remaining 10 physical servers at a later date.

The servers virtualized to the x3850 M2 servers are all based on Microsoft® Windows®, and include: e-mail servers; personal data storage; Web servers for distributing course materials; the ePunahou news portal; Moodle.org, an open-source course management system; and an ERP system from Senior Systems that combines administration, donor management and student information management.

By enabling Punahou School to decommission 40 physical servers, the IBM virtualization solution has given the school a more compact and energy-efficient infrastructure for its core systems. Says Wendi Kamiya, “We have measured a 32 percent reduction in power consumption for our servers. Taking into account the reduction in cooling requirements, we can confidently say that we have already reduced our data center costs by at least 60 percent.”


Reduced risk, enhanced flexibility

In addition to reducing the cost and environmental impact of Punahou School’s data center, the new IBM infrastructure has reduced business risk. The drop in cooling requirements has enabled the school to put two of its data center air conditioning units on standby, ready to be activated if another unit fails.

“As well as providing redundancy in our cooling infrastructure, the IBM solution offers increased resiliency across processing, storage and power supplies,” says Wendi Kamiya. “The System x servers share multiple processors, disk drives, power supplies and I/O across multiple virtual machines. The failure of a single redundant component will therefore not impact production”

Another major advantage of the new infrastructure is its flexibility. Using VMware, Punahou School can easily and rapidly create new virtual servers to meet emerging business requirements. The school currently has 43 production environments and seven test environments across the four System x servers.

“We have definitely taken the opportunity to grow the virtual environment,” says Wendi Kamiya. “Virtualization on System x has opened up a whole world of new possibilities, giving us a great improvement in flexibility and speed of response.”


Smart investment for the future

Virtualization ensures that Punahou School is no longer under-utilizing its physical server resources. If the workload on a particular virtual server decreases, VMware automatically makes its resources available to the other virtual servers.

“Virtualization is one of the smartest things we’ve ever done,” says Wendi Kamiya. “Now, we have a single target for investment in new processing power and storage capacity.”

In tough economic times, Wendi Kamiya is confident that making the right IT investments will actually save money in addition to enabling higher quality service to users.

“The cost savings for virtualization on IBM System x are persuasive; thanks to the advanced power management, we can see payback in less than five years,” concludes Wendi Kamiya. “The new dynamic infrastructure from IBM gives us the ability to move forward with confidence. We set and achieve very high standards, and this project with IBM met our standard of excellence.”