When your IT staff plug a machine into a power socket and hit the ‘on’ switch, are they thinking about how much that power costs? If not, then maybe it’s time to fill them in on the realities of how much electricity costs in Ireland.
According to a recent report issued by the Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland (SEAI), Irish electricity rates are amongst the highest in Europe. And while the cost per kilowatt in this country has dropped recently, Ireland is still more expensive than countries like Norway, Denmark, Estonia and Bulgaria when it comes to purchasing power.
With IT departments among the heaviest users of power in the enterprise, it’s not surprising that many chief information officers (CIO) are finding themselves under increased pressure to find ways to lower their power overheads.
Gaining importance
“Power used to be something that the buildings and facilities people worried about, but it’s now a major concern for the CIO as both consumption and sourcing have become important issues,” said David O’Connor of APC Ireland.
“The CFO and the MD of the organisation have started to become very interested in the power consumed in the data centre, and the cost of that power, as power is increasingly becoming a direct cost of doing business, not just of running one department.”
Many CIOs now find themselves in the middle of a ‘perfect electrical storm’ as a variety of factors coincide to make power management a pressing issue. Power has become more expensive, global recession has made IT budgets contract (and in some cases disappear) and corporate responsibility policies increasingly call for companies to find sustainable ways to reduce their energy usage.
“A few years ago nobody in the IT industry really cared about power management because nobody in that area saw the bills,” said Joe Baguley of Quest software.
“That’s no longer the case – attitudes are changing and we’re now seeing two effects. The first is that the rising cost of electricity is finally getting noticed from a financial point of view, and the second is that corporate social responsibility is playing a role in how this issue is tackled. There is an onus on companies to reduce their energy consumption and to appear to be green.”
Options available
While larger companies are likely to have large power bills, and be able to achieve greater savings, even small companies can make a significant difference to the way they use power and how much they pay for it, according to Katrina Timmis, sales manager for Epson Ireland.
“The most obvious power management action for a company is to introduce a formal ‘turn-it-off’ policy and make someone responsible in each department for checking that printers, monitors, PCs, projectors etc are turned off at the end of the working day. The next step is to ensure that the procurement policy incorporates some form of energy efficiency criteria,” she said.
“This doesn’t have to be over complicated; it can simply be a general requirement that the products purchased meet a recognised standard such as Energy Star, a standard awarded to the most energy efficient products in the market covering PCs, monitors and imaging equipment.”
“To avoid relying on staff to switch off equipment, look for products that can be programmed to do this automatically at a pre-set time.”
Virtual dividend
While there are lots of things smaller companies can do to bring down their power bills, the most prevalent trend in the data centre is the introduction of virtualisation, allowing companies to dramatically reduce the number of physical servers they use, as well as replace expensive desktop machines with thin clients that can run virtual desktops.
“If you’ve got a heavy x86 platform, you just absolutely have to be virtualising your data centre – it’s a no brainer from a power management and return on investment perspective,” said Chris Murphy, data centre manager for EMC in Ireland.
Murphy reports that EMC has achieved impressive power management savings internally by aggressively pursuing efficiencies.
“We’re very focused internally on how we can reduce the cost per kilowatt and also on how we can reduce usage, so that in essence we get more from each kilowatt that we do use. We implemented hot/cold aisles to encourage efficient natural air flows, we consolidated islands of storage into one large storage area network (SAN) and then we moved into a phase of hyper virtualisation,” he said.
“Right now we have 200 virtual servers sitting on four physical servers, and there are lots of empty racks spaces in the data centre. In the past, all of those rack spaces would have been full of servers generating heat, needing to be cooled and pulling power out of the walls.”
By doing this, EMC calculates that it has saved $1.6 million (EUR*1.3 million) in Ireland alone, and a total of $13 million (EUR*10.5 million) globally, over a five year period.
“We’re reaping huge benefits – that’s a massive saving that we’re giving back to the company to spend on R&D and more. Some of this was achieved in the form of avoided costs – we didn’t have to buy new physical servers – and some of it was because we were able to decommission our old servers. Some of it was also made up of environmental savings. At the same time, we were able to reduce our power usage by 75% and our cooling bill by 75% because there was less heat being generated,” said Murphy.
Climate advantage
Interestingly, Murphy believes there is scope for Ireland to differentiate itself from international competitors in the data centre space by capitalising on our climate.
“Due to our weather patterns, we don’t need to air condition as much as say, a company located in India would need to. For 90% of the year, we don’t even need to turn our AC on – and it accounts for 35% of the power we use in the data centre. We’re currently also investigating the idea of retro-fitting fresh air cooling as an alternative and that’s looking good. You have to screen off humidity and dust, but it’s doable.”
Murphy suggests that other companies looking to achieve similar savings should start with virtualising their servers and desktops if they haven’t already done so, and then look further into technologies such as deduplication to shrink the size of the information footprint in the data centre.
“Smaller data footprints means less resources are needed to maintain what you’ve got. We’re also moving less information around using fully automated storage tiering, which automatically puts data in the right place at the right time. Techniques like this add up to a lot less hardware on the floor, which gives you savings in terms of procuring, operating and disposing of that hardware,” said Murphy.
Subscribers 0
Fans 0
Followers 0
Followers