Saving money though reducing the environmental impact of IT has gained increased urgency in our down economy. Green computing even has a Wikipedia entry. Fortunately, many of the Green IT efforts also result in cost reduction. One of our business partners, Software AG, has looked at ways that SOA can help here – see Eco-computing: Software AG and the Hasso Plattner Institute Demonstrate SOA’s Green Potential.
Software AG and the Potsdam-based Hasso Plattner Institute for Software Systems Engineering (HPI) completed a one-year research project examining the impact of service-oriented architecture (SOA) governance on Green IT practices. They developed methods and tools for optimizing resource sharing of IT services, thereby reducing energy consumption and lowering hardware costs. Using these methods, administrators of complex IT landscapes can determine exactly how much computing power is needed, as well as the maximum amount of energy each service might use. With proper SOA governance you can regulate and more tightly control energy costs by taking advantage of the more efficient distribution of services that SOA can bring. This makes sense and is one more reason to make sure your SOA governance is carefully conceived.
There are other ways SOA can have a positive eco-impact, as well as a bottom line impact. For example, virtualization of hardware saves the materials and energy consumption of so many servers - as much as 10 to 1. Most companies have already gone that far, but what about the kinds of applications that are too distributed (i.e. shared services and Cloud-based apps) or too monolithic (i.e. mainframes, major enterprise apps) to be replicated via hardware virtualization?
We call this Service Virtualization and it allows the behavior of complex SOA applications to be captured and simulated - which is key to achieving the productivity and efficiency you expect from SOA. Therefore, if you could save the cost of attempting to replicate several distributed applications and services, that's saving a lot more processing power throughout the lifecycle and not just servers in your own data center. In addition, it allows you to scale down hardware and processing power in your test lab, and in deployment, as you no longer have to try to make a live instance available to so many teams, or scale up the hardware of the live instance to handle a bunch of extra capacity.
There are more savings to be harvested. When you break up project teams into smaller "agile" teams focused on enabling certain Services for use and reuse, you gain additional efficiencies besides Agility and labor cost savings (see our recent paper: "Agility Across the SOA Lifecycle" for more).
Think about the reduced need for travel, and for dozens of people to occupy an office configuring and maintaining separate test environments per partner and per test/development team. The more we can do to decouple our dependencies on constrained servers and applications, and decouple our interdepency on other teams' lifecycles through service virtualization, the bigger the positive ripple effect between the interaction of technology and the environment.
We welcome any discussion and ideas about how Virtualization in a Service-Oriented World can make a difference in the world.
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