In our world today, individuals and businesses are looking for ways to cut down on their electricity consumption - not only to decrease their monthly expenses, but also to play a part in helping to clean up our environment. IT equipment, like workstations, charging laptops, servers, projectors, TVs, and networking equipment, draws a considerable amount of power and could well be one of your company’s largest energy consumers. IT manufacturers have been aware of this for some time and are trying to create equipment that is more efficient. This white paper will explore several areas where small and medium businesses can start making their IT infrastructure greener.
The cost of traditional energy production has increased significantly over the past few decades. While the cost of technology for renewable sources of energy is declining, it still has a way to go before it can replace its predecessor. We all still connect to the local municipal power company which gets their electricity from a number of sources, the bulk of which comes from the increasingly costly fossil fuels, whether that cost be monetary or environmental. And according to the Energy Information Administration’s (EIA) Annual Energy Outlook 2006, the raw consumption of energy, as opposed to dollars being spent on energy, is projected to grow one percent annually over the next 25 years. According to the EIA’s 2003 Commercial Buildings Energy Consumption Survey, total electricity consumption for commercial buildings with one to four computers, and one to four dedicated servers, was 495 billion kWh or, in terms we all can more easily put into perspective, 38.9 billion dollars. If we take a look at the total of all the commercial buildings in the US with at least one computer and at least one server, that number grows to 1.43 MWh or 108.9 billion dollars in electricity expenditures. In fact, according to this data gathered in 2003, commercial buildings with computers was the 4th highest in electricity expenditures surpassed by those with lighting, cooling and heating, which all occupied buildings have anyway. One can then argue that computers themselves are at least in the top five of what impacts a business’s electricity bill each month. Even the House Committee for Small Business has stated that the energy crisis has disproportionately impacted the small business sector. They go on to say that “changes to these resources have
a more significant impact on small businesses due to their comparatively higher production costs and tighter profit margins. Their unique financial situation, in comparison to larger firms, makes them less able to absorb or pass on energy price hikes. Higher resource prices directly impact the firms’ budgets and profits as they have few financial reserves to cover additional expenditures. Smaller firms are vulnerable to rapid price spikes as they are unable to balance these against long term revenues and sources of capital. These small entities lack the ability to “weather the storm” by tapping into reserves when prices rise dramatically.”
It’s getting more difficult for small businesses to keep the delicate balance between their expenses and the price of their services or goods. When the production costs, like the utility bill, increase, the business has some choices it can make. It can delay the delivery of their service or good, or they can increase the prices of those services and/or goods. But, of course, if they delay too long, or raise the prices too high, they risk losing customers and reputation. So another choice is to try to trim those costs of production somehow.
Cutting costs of production, even the energy
consumption, can cause issues with the quality of the product or service offered. Obviously, turning off the heat in the winter and air conditioning in the summer will very well cut costs, but employees and sometimes the products themselves will suffer from not having a suitable environment. Or, while shutting down certain machines and having the process done manually can save on the amount of required electricity, the process might be considerably slower without that automation or the quality will be lessened. Neither will make the customer happy.
Fortunately for all of us, technology companies have realized how to create their better, faster and stronger devices by using less and less electricity. There have also been improvements to software and better processes
When the production costs, like the
utility bill, increase, the business
has some choices it can make.
developed for businesses looking to cut down on their electricity consumption to help reduce costs. So, the general solution for businesses wanting to go green in their IT departments is to implement solutions involving equipment and processes that will cut their energy consumption.
Green Solutions to Consider
LCD vs CRT
One option to address this growing problem is replacing aging IT equipment with newer, more energy efficient products. Most businesses are already doing this in a way that can’t really be avoided−that is replacing old and bulky CRT monitors with LCDs. Some LCDs can consume half to two-thirds as much energy as their CRT counterparts, not to mention produce less heat. Add to this the desk space requirements of the old CRTs, the lower cost of buying LCDs, and the general lack of CRTs even available for sale, and a company can’t help but go “green” in this slight way.
Our standard here at Sundog has been LCDs for quite a few years. The challenge we ran into was finding an economical and green way to dispose of the CRT monitors. You can pay the city to dispose of them on an annual basis. We have now found we can take them to our local Best Buy for recycling, pay a small fee, and get a gift card equal to that fee!
Laptop vs Workstation
While making the jump from CRTs to LCDs has been completed by most businesses today−it’s only one small step in making IT greener. Another step involves using laptops versus PCs.
There are many arguments online about how much power a charging laptop consumes versus a constantly on workstation. In general, people agree that a laptop will consume less power over time, especially if it’s a habit of the employees to leave on their workstations 24/7. Laptops are more likely to be shut down at night or when they aren’t going to be used for a while.
Again, this step is a small one and also one that many businesses aren’t fighting to take. In our mobile world today, having a laptop is almost a requirement. And manufacturers are making laptops that can rival a lot of the higher-end workstations when it comes to processing power. Sundog has moved many employees to laptops for the ease of being able to attend meetings with their files and working from home when the need arises. With laptops becoming as powerful as most workstations, it wasn’t a tough sell for the users. With the prices of those “mobile workstations” being comparable to a lot of the desktop workstations, it wasn’t hard for us to choose them from a budget standpoint either.
VMs vs. Physical Servers
Depending on the size and scope of your company’s work, you might have one or many dedicated servers for handling different aspects of running your business. Since servers are meant to be running 24/7, they consume a good amount of power. While some servers need to be processing large amounts of data frequently, some servers actually sit idle for most of the time, e.g. Active Directory, DNS, DHCP servers. If you have each of these servers running on separate physical machines, the power that’s being used can seem to be almost wasteful. More and more businesses are starting to use virtual machines to consolidate multiple physical servers onto fewer or even one physical machine.
One of the most used and popular companies that’s making this possible is VMware. Microsoft also offers a product called Virtual Server. These products make it relatively simple to set up a physical server to be the host of multiple virtual servers. Not only does this cut down on the power consumption and heat production of a server room, but it also can save a company thousands of dollars in hardware costs for physical machines.
Many sites online actually have a savings calculator that you can use to estimate how much money you can save in power consumption and equipment costs by converting physical servers into virtual servers. See the Resources page at the end of this paper for a list of a few of these. At Sundog, we’ve gone from approximately 40 physical
servers three years ago, with only a few virtual servers, to less than 20 physical servers today. We hope to drop that number to around 10 by this time next year. The nice thing I’ve found with VMs is that if we want to test out a certain combination of software with a certain operating system, I don’t have to piece together a server from parts laying around, nor do we have to order a new machine. I can simply create it, test and destroy it whenever necessary.
Blade Servers
Some server manufacturers like IBM and HP have reduced the physical server requirements and are offering ways to not only cut down on power consumption, but also on space. There’s no need to have eight computers all plugged into eight identical power supplies that are all rated for 300 watts but are using 90w each. We can have one power supply that they all plug into and if a machine needs more power, it’s given to it as needed. This is one of the many benefits that blade server options provide us. Instead of buying six to eight physical servers, you can buy one blade chassis that eight blade servers will plug into. The chassis has the fans, power supplies, networking and management software to run the blade servers, which simply plug into it. Most of the chassis are expandable so you can start out with two or four power supplies and add on if you’re needing more.
The software that runs the chassis and manages the blade servers, throttles the power and fans up and down as the processing load of its blades increases or decreases. Where one physical server may have itself throttled down to 100w of power use, a whole blade chassis with six to eight blade servers could consume only 30-40w of power per server. Add to this the option of running virtual
servers on each blade, and a company can take itself from 50 physical servers, down to one blade chassis with five blade servers all running 10 virtual servers. The cost savings on both power consumption and cooling costs could be very significant indeed!
At Sundog, we’ve recently installed a blade server chassis from HP that is allowing us to add the capability to reduce not only our power footprint, but free up rack space in our server room. I’ve been able to remove two racks from our server room and will be replacing another full rack this year with a half-sized rack. This has not only helped with power, but I’ve noticed a significant change in the temperature of the room−it’s quite chilly in there now where it used to be a little too warm for comfort. The AC unit isn’t running as constant as before.
Move into the Cloud
Many are taking the virtualizing option one step further and completely cutting their power consumption, moving their servers into the “cloud.” Instead of having the physical server sitting in a room on your premise, you rent or lease servers or parts of servers from a company with that specialty. This removes your power consumption for them completely and puts it in a location where multiple companies are doing the same. In a way, most businesses are already doing this to at least one extent: hosting their website.
Website hosting companies have been using the idea of “many instances to one server” for a while when it comes to websites. Running a website usually is a job that a server can do while sitting idle. So hosting companies have offered “shared” hosting packages to save time and money for everyone. For those websites that are large and have complex databases and custom scripts, most hosting companies are also offering both virtual dedicated servers (Virtual Servers) and fully dedicated servers (Physical Servers) for more processing and load horsepower.
In a lot of cases, businesses don’t have to use these servers for just hosting websites−they still have full access to the server except are unable to physically touch them. For some people and for some servers, this is a
Many are taking the
virtualizing option one step
further and completely cutting
their power consumption.
concern, but for others it isn’t. This option is a great way to not only cut down on your power consumption by reducing or eliminating physical servers, but could also completely remove the need for a server room. This means no air conditioning, which will save even more money each year. There are many companies that offer these hosting options like RimuHosting or Rackspace. Rackspace and Amazon are offering something similar to virtual dedicated servers, but theirs are expandable as the use increases (or decreases for that matter). Amazon calls it Elastic Compute Cloud and Rackspace’s is Cloud Hosting. It works in much the same way as the virtual servers that others offer, but you only pay for what you’re using as far as processor usage time goes. They also offer Cloud storage options so your files can be stored and accessed from anywhere you have an internet connection. See the Resources section for links to some of these Cloud hosting options.
Sundog has, for the past three years or so, recommended cloud hosting for all the websites we help design. We toyed with the idea of being a hosting company ourselves, but with so many others out there who have the dedicated facilities and staff, we decided not to add to the power draw we already have. We have also moved to Google Apps. This eliminates the need of keeping our server and reduces pulling significant power. This way, we have no hardware to maintain plus our employees can get access to their email, calendar, and files from anywhere without IT having to worry about certificates, firewalls, or updates.
Plan it Out
These are just a few of the most popular and easy-to-implement ways for businesses to make their IT department more green. When planning your technology budget and creating a roadmap of where you’d like to be in a few years, keep these options in mind. Do some research on what it would take to implement some new greener technology or services. In a lot of cases, it’s becoming even more economical to be more green in the IT sector than it has been in the past. And a lot of the time, spending money on new equipment or services will allow your company to recoup some money in other areas like maintenance and electricity costs.
Sources:
EIA Annual Energy Outlook 2006 (February 2006).
Commercial Energy Consumption Survey. Retrieved July 29, 2010 from Energy Information Administration: http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/cbecs/contents.html
Impact of Rising Energy Costs on Small Business (August 2006)
LCD Basics. Retrieved July 29, 2010 from Energy Star: http://www.energystar.gov/index.cfm?c=monitors.lcd
Virtual Server savings calculators:
Microsoft - www.microsoft.com/environment/greenit/ saygoodbyetoyourservers.com/savings-calculators/
VMWare - www.vmwareyourtime.com/nam/?src=SMB-ACQ-WEBHOME#/virtualization-savings-calculator
Cloud Hosting:
Amazon EC2 - aws.amazon.com/ec2/ Rackspace - www.rackspace.com
Rackspace Cloud - www.rackspacecloud.com RimuHosting - www.rimuhosting.com
