Autodesk Labs is going Green

Frederic Loranger is one of our software developers at Autodesk Labs. He has worked on projects like 3D/2D ShareNow for AutoCAD, Inventor, Revit, Design Review; Project Freewheel, consolidated login; Project Draw; and Project Showroom. Frederic has also conducted usability studies in the area of virtualization. Frederic filed this report.

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By now, you have probably heard about virtualization and what it can do to your organization; improve the management and the utilization of hardware resources while reducing your footprint on the environment. Server Virtualization is à la mode these days, especially with the hard economic times we are going through. And with the free virtualization server host Operating Systems offered by major vendors such as VMware (ESXi), Microsoft (Hyper-V), and Citrix (XenServer), there is no reason why you shouldn’t take advantage of it yourself.

Autodesk Labs has done its homework – we are going green. In an effort to reduce our carbon footprint and to align our division with the Autodesk Global Sustainability Initiative, we recently consolidated various file servers, build servers, code vaults, and developer integration servers into one single physical server!

The results are obvious to the uninitiated: it reduces overall power consumption; It eases management of resources; it better utilizes the available hardware; it allows for easy hardware upgrades on the physical server, to name a few.

The one area where server virtualization is most at risk is with having fewer points of failure; in our case a single point of failure. Were our physical server to burst in flame or disintegrate mysteriously, all of our assets would be lost ad vitam aeternam. However, the various server virtualization technologies address this problem by offering automatic failover capabilities for mission critical assets.

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Thanks Frederic. Going green is alive in the lab.