Go Green
From Dennis Moreau, Ph.D. and Chief Technology Officer for Configuresoft
Why Should I Care?
Rising energy costs are taking a toll everywhere and enterprise IT organizations are no exception. In fact, a recent Gartner poll showed that more than 70 percent of data centers are constrained for power, cooling and space. Companies everywhere are looking to decrease their power consumption and reduce expenses. Green IT is leading the charge as organizations are emphasizing energy-efficient data center technologies. The growing costs and scarcity of electricity have made the high energy demands of the traditional datacenter simply an unsustainable business model.
Everyone from the CEO, Board of Directors and most importantly your customers are concerned with how green your company is. Are you taking the right steps to reduce your power costs and energy consumption? There are a few key areas where IT operations can take the lead to utilize automation and best practices and achieve energy efficiencies while reducing operational costs.
If you are still not convinced that this a growing problem, just take a look at what other industry experts are saying:
- A recent poll from Gartner research shows that 70% of CIOs are concerned about Power/Cooling (Gartner)
- Power/cooling capacity will be an issue for 50% of data centers in 2008 (Gartner)
- There is a total of $0.50 spent on power and cooling for each $1.00 on hardware (IDC)
- Energy expenses in data centers are expected to double in 5 years (EPA)
- In 2009, 70% of organizations will have energy cost as their second highest operating expense (Gartner )
- $11.5 billion - The total estimated energy bill for datacenters come 2010, up from $8.6 billion in 2007
What Can I Do?
Before we start to examine the logical steps organizations can take to start reducing energy costs, we need to fully understand our IT infrastructure. We can’t control what we can't measure! Since a majority of IT departments do not actually see their electrical bill how can they know where to start cutting down on energy consumption? It is absolutely essential to have visibility across the enterprise, without this organizations cannot easily identify where they can consolidate, which servers are likely candidates for virtualization, where my volume servers are and ultimately how much power am I consuming. Once you have this data organizations are able to make more informed decisions and dramatically reduce costs and power consumption.
Now let’s examine some simple strategies to green the datacenter. The first and most obvious is power management. Most organizations have some type of tool in place to manage these settings, however the visibility into each desktop, laptop and server across the enterprise may be lacking. A simple configuration setting will allow you to power-up and power-down machines without interrupting critical business applications, scheduled maintenance, patches, etc. Power has already exceeded new server spend and will soon be the dominant operating expense for a data center in years to come. By simply applying power management settings across desktops, laptops and monitors, organizations can save in upwards of $75 annually per computer.
Another key initiative for IT operations looking to reduce energy consumption is identifying quick fixes on the money spent for cooling your data center. There are quite a few technologies and fancy gadgets that help cool a data center, but more often than not simple strategies can be just as effective. Many older boxes require a significant amount of cooling. Consider replacing these boxes with new servers. Often the cost savings in energy alone offset the cost of the new hardware. Another important technique to examine is turning up the thermostat in the data center. The American Society of Heating, Refrigeration, and Air Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE) recommend a temperature range of 68 to 72 degrees Fahrenheit. Instead of setting the thermostat at 68, turn it up! Studies suggest you can save roughly 4% in cooling energy by raising the thermostat just one degree (searchCIO.com).
Finally, one of the most important initiatives for successful Green IT strategies is to consolidate and virtualize the IT environment. The net effect of this is that consolidation and virtualization allow organizations to reduce the number of physical servers in the data center. This consolidation results in reducing costs for cooling, hardware and overall power consumption. According to analyst firm IDC, un-utilized server capacity equates to approximately $140 billion, 3 years supply of hardware and more than 20 million servers. Additionally, more and more utility companies are offering rebate incentives to data centers that adopt power-saving virtualization technologies.
The numbers are real when it comes to actual cost savings. The bottom line is that greening your data center makes economic sense:
- Cost savings from removing physical servers can add up quickly — up to $1,200 in energy costs per server per year (ComputerWorld.com)
- Many utility companies are offering "virtualization incentive" programs that pays $150 to $300 per server removed from service as a result of a server consolidation project (PG&E Corp, San Francisco-based utility company)
- Reducing office cooling loads can save an additional $5–10 per PC annually and as much as $10–25 or more in warm climates (EPA Energy Star)
- Turning off unused servers can cut data center energy requirements by about 20% (ComputerWorld.com)
- The EPA estimates that energy-management best practices combined with IT consolidation could reduce data center power consumption by as much as 45 percent ("Report to Congress on Server and Data Center Energy Efficiency," U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, August 2007)
Join Configuresoft and take the lead in greening your datacenter, not only are you reducing energy costs but ultimately mitigating the environmental impact of IT.
Click here to Go Green with Configuresoft