Sybase Inc. saved millions of dollars in power costs and avoided a space expansion project by investing in environmentally friendly technologies such as virtualization software and Sybase IQ. Because Sybase IQ is a column based database, the Sybase IQ data compression technology is eco friendly and produces 85 percent less carbon dioxide than a traditional database.
http://www.sybase.com
[Video Transcript]
Faced with rising cooling and space needs in its data center, Sybases IT department undertook a project to reduce the centers energy usage. The project was aimed at reducing costs, decreasing Sybases carbon footprint and avoiding expansion of the data center. As a CFO, we are trying to balance both whats best from a bottom line perspective, what makes sense both from a cost and from a return on the investment perspective, and then what kind of image we are trying to portray as a company, both to the outside world and to our employees. When we look at various projects, and green projects, and whether they make sense and whether its something the company would be interested in them. The number one concern still is, does it make sense from a bottom line. I would say that lately there are a lot more very cost attractive things the companies can do and in many cases going green is very good for business. Its very good for the bottom line. Sybase has been very proactive in exploring green alternatives, both from the standpoint of some of our products, which have a high green component including IQ, which is much more energy efficient to run, and some of our other products and then places like our IT groups and our facilities groups that are actively looking into opportunities to save the companies both energy costs and reduce our carbon footprint. We have been very much on the forefront of trying to figure out what the carbon footprint of our corporation is and then doing everything we can to reduce it. Sybase IT over the last couple of years has introduced a number of green technologies, which included Sybase IQ along with other virtualization technologies that we get from our partners. We designed our data center for a five year growth pattern and so, when it was about five years, we knew that we would be monitoring regularly so we would know when we were about to reach our cooling capacity and we would make some changes in that area. We have architectural roadmaps, so our team developed a three year roadmap based on technologies that are coming and also based on our growth. We have had projects on virtualization on our roadmap for the last couple of years. We have experimented with the technology, and last year we thought that the technology was mature enough for us to do a pilot. That pilot was very successful and we started with a virtualization project for the entire data center. We showed a return on the investment, and the benefit of the virtualization program, especially when you can have an cost avoidance of 8 to 20 million dollars, not having to update the data center, so file management, that was an easy one for them. In exploring the various alternatives we had, the IT group presented to us this very innovative green alternative towards solving the problem. Its one of those solutions that its a win/win, its green, it cost effective and theres a cost avoidance capacity. It was a great solution. Historically we had the growth pattern of 12% every year and we had a finite amount of power cooling capacity in the data center, so based on that projection, working with facilities, we realized that within a year or so we would be running out of capacity and we would have to either build a new data center or do major upgrades to the data center. An alternative solution was to go with virtualization, which would cost less, we wouldnt have to expand the data center and we would extend the life of the data center by many years even beyond the projection. Our data center has a heterogeneous environment, so we have a multitude of operating systems and various hardware architectures, the single solution would not have been suitable for us, so we target the core operating systems in the data center, namely Solaris, Lennox and Windows. Sybase IQs data compression technology actually have a very significant role in making the product very eco-friendly. Sybase is a column based database.
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What is a Columnar Database?by Intricity1014,671 views
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