Energy Use & Climate Change

Efficient Data Centers

Each and every day, EMC IT strives to advance EMC’s vision and strategy for delivering secure Cloud Computing and Big Data while delivering IT services to our business units.

EMC leverages our leadership in information management and Cloud Computing to transform our own IT operations to deliver IT-as-a-Service to the business. We develop and apply our technology solutions and other industry best practices for energy-efficient virtual data centers. In doing so we are addressing the same challenges EMC customers face in their respective organizations – providing purposeful, innovative and transformative options to manage digital information growth, while working within the constraints of energy availability and space.

Our Cloud Transformation

EMC IT supports approximately 53,000 ”internal” users working in 150 corporate offices in more than 50 countries. EMC’s Global IT environment spans five data centers hosting more than 500 applications and twelve petabytes (12 PB) of information storage. EMC IT collaborates closely with the EMC global sales and services organization, which supports more than 400,000 customers and partners in 80 countries across 20 languages.

To gain agility, improve efficiency, and enable business innovation and competitive advantage for the company, EMC IT embarked on a multi-year Journey to the Cloud—moving from a physical to a highly virtualized IT infrastructure and more automated processes that will enable IT-as-a-Service. While our journey was fueled initially for economic reasons, it has also produced environmental benefits from reduced GHG emissions and material consumption.

Learn more about our Cloud journey at EMC IT Proven .

Leveraging our Technology for Efficiency

Virtualization and Cloud Computing are improving energy efficiency in our data centers. By leveraging our own technologies – virtualization, data deduplication and Fully Automated Storage Tiering (FAST) – we are delivering significant energy and cost savings on the journey to the Cloud.

Dynamic allocation of server and storage resources in a virtual IT infrastructure allows us to strike the right balance between energy-efficiency and business performance. Our virtualization strategy includes:

• Tiered, shared and virtualized server and storage clusters
• Virtual (thin) provisioning of IT infrastructure
• Integrated management and automation for virtualized infrastructure

In 2004, we began our virtualization journey. By the end of 2011, EMC IT had virtualized 85 percent of OS images and 100 percent of our x86 server environment. On average, we are achieving virtual to physical consolidation ratios of 22:1. We have realized a four-fold gain in server and storage utilization and a 170 percent improvement in storage administration productivity. In addition we reduced the number of databases from 51 to six.

By deploying our Avamar® and Data Domain® data deduplication solutions, we have reduced the backup storage capacity required by 70 percent while considerably shrinking the backup windows. Disk-based backup, archiving and data deduplication have significantly improved the overall efficiency of our backup and recovery environment.

FAST technology, which automatically moves data to the appropriate tier of storage, such as flash drives for ultra-high performance, or SATA drives for infrequently used information, is further optimizing our storage infrastructure for performance, energy-efficiency and cost.

Operationally, from 2004-2011 our Cloud journey has saved the company millions of dollars while improving productivity and driving value and agility for the business. During this period, EMC IT realized capital savings of $120 million and operational savings of $66 million. We also managed to reduce energy consumption by 34 percent and shrink our carbon footprint by nearly 100 million pounds of CO2e.

New EMC Data Center in Durham, North Carolina

EMC officially opened the doors to its new Durham Cloud data center on September 15, 2011.

Built with leading technology solutions from EMC, VMware and the VCE Company, the 100 percent virtualized Durham datacenter is the foundation for EMC IT’s Cloud vision and transformation to IT-as-a-Service. The new data center will enable EMC IT to deliver the agility, flexibility and scalability needed for current and future business needs. Additionally, this state-of-the-art facility provides a world-class showcase for customers and enables employees to tap into Cloud capabilities through its global R&D labs.

The Tier III data center meets stringent PUE objectives of 1.3 and is on course to being LEED Corporate Interiors (CI) certified. Environmental innovations include a rooftop water collection system, free air cooling for much of the year, and flywheel technology that eliminates the need for batteries in uninterruptable power systems (UPS). To learn more about the energy efficient design and construction at Durham Cloud data center, visit Efficient Facilities.