The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in California has successfully taken out 26 data centers, a victory that has yielded annual savings of $ 305,000 in energy bills and $ 43,000 in maintenance costs. More significantly, it calculates it has saved an estimated $ 10m on future equipment purchases.

The savings comes despite the organisation’s expanding workload, handling big data streams on counter terrorism, defence, bio security, energy and basic science. They also take place while the US government has a major program to save $ 1 billion by consolidating public sector data centers.

Despite the exponential growth of each of these big data sources and a soaring processing burden, the agency has been able to make sufficient efficiency savings to merit closing 26 data centers and rationalizing its estate.  The achievement has been recognised with a US Department of Energy Sustainability Award, which cites its ‘exemplary performance in advancing sustainability objectives through innovative and effective projects’.

More than 60 sites
LLNL is known for its high performance computing (HPC), using systems such as the Cray Catalyst shown here, and IBM Blue Gene systems that have scored well in the supercomputing league. But the organization has a lot more IT: within the LLNL any computing facility comprising at least 500 square feet, that contains one or more servers, can be categorized as a data center. At the start of the consolidation drive, in 2011, LLNL had over 60 data centers of varying sizes, dedicated to discrete projects.

In the consolidation 126 physical servers were moved to the organisation’s new Enterprise Data Center (EDC), where a 15,620 square foot facility houses 2,500 mission critical science, engineering, computational research and business computing systems.

The operations team at EDC created 140 virtual servers to act as a private cloud in which virtual servers could pool unused CPU space on physical servers. Using this processing power for multiple clients helped the EDC drastically cut the number of physical servers needed. A single physical platform can be subdivided to create up to 50 virtual servers.

LLNL chief information office Doug East has promised a “broader institutional phase” to build on these initial easy win savings. The operational savings on closing 26 data centers were, he said, the “low hanging fruit.”

The US Department of Energy’s Better Building Challenge obligates the LLNL to cut the energy intensity of data centers by at least 20% in 10 years.

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