University of Miami - School of Law

The Law School IT Department Goes Green
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More than a year ago, the University of Miami School of Law Information Technology Department embarked on a plan to decrease the electrical energy consumption, cooling requirements and space needs of the server room, which serves as the heart of our computer network. We sought a design that would decrease the space and energy requirements of the server room while simultaneously increasing the redundancy, and therefore the reliability, of our networked services.

We adopted the design approach of server consolidation and virtualization. The idea behind this model is to consolidate the operations of several servers onto one shared set of physical hardware. The formerly separate servers exist in virtual, independently operating partitions on their shared server, making it possible to house several virtual servers running different operating systems on the same server hardware.  Every component of the server architecture, as well as the configurations and data residing on the individual virtualized servers, are duplicated to allow transparent, or very rapid restoration of services, in the event of hardware failure.

To date, we have virtualized eleven servers that were formerly each running on separate server hardware. We have not experienced any unplanned downtime of services that are hosted on these virtualized servers. Over the next six months, we plan to virtualize and consolidate an additional twenty-six servers. When we started our work on this project, we had sixty-eight individual servers. When this work is complete, we will have reduced our number of physical servers to thirty-five.

We are gathering data on the decreased consumption of energy used to power and cool our server room. As we gather that information, we will post it on this page.