Previous posts spoke about the impact of Green
IT on business. Green IT is not another Green label. The fact is that Green IT
awareness does good to your business.
This post focuses on the energy consumption in IT and provides some solutions to reducing the energy bill of the company. Particularly, this post explores the ways to significantly minimize the bill pertaining to the energy consumed by the servers of a company. The server is at the heart of many company’s IT’s system and IT’s policy.
This post focuses on the energy consumption in IT and provides some solutions to reducing the energy bill of the company. Particularly, this post explores the ways to significantly minimize the bill pertaining to the energy consumed by the servers of a company. The server is at the heart of many company’s IT’s system and IT’s policy.
Energy consumption represents 10% of the
functioning costs of a server. This share of the costs could easily rise to 50%
without a policy that considers the reduction of those IT costs. More often
these days the company’s work is digitalized and this “all computer” policy,
which sometimes reduce other costs such as the paper costs, increase the
servers and energy costs. According to some studies by the IDC, in the coming
years, for $1 invested in the hardware of the company, $1 will be spent for the
energy.
One suggestion to reduce the cost of the servers is to optimize their utilization. Most of the servers of companies are under utilized. On average, servers utilize 5% of their capacity (for you to have an illustration, think about how much of the storage capacity in your personal computer, smartphone, external hard drive and other storage possibilities you use). An unused server consumes 56% of its maximum power. Today, thanks to the evolving technologies of the data’s storage, and the increase in efficiency of the hard drive, more data can be stored on smaller devices.
Another source of costs is the cooling system
of the servers’ rooms. The cooling represents 40% of the energy consumed by a
server. As the cooling requires energy to run, a significant part of the energy
bill comes from the cooling system of a company. To lower the cost of the
cooling system, a new system of cooling, called water cooling is very efficient
and highly reduce the costs of the cooling system of the IT system of a
company.
Another solution to reduce the energy bill of a
company is to use energy management software that could optimize the energy
consumption of the IT of a company. This is a simple way to reduce the energy
bill.
In addition to the previously mentioned
solutions, the virtualization of the servers significantly reduces the electricity
bill. Through virtualization, different servers are united in one server. This
not only allows for a more efficient management of the company’s servers, but
it also reduces the wastes generated by a multiplication of the number of
servers.
It is worth mentioning that the Green IT approaches can have an impact on a company only if the top management of the company is involved. For there is a need of the implication of the top of the company to agree on decisions such as the choice of an IT policy that will drive many of the choices and options mentioned above.
It is worth mentioning that the Green IT approaches can have an impact on a company only if the top management of the company is involved. For there is a need of the implication of the top of the company to agree on decisions such as the choice of an IT policy that will drive many of the choices and options mentioned above.
The above mentioned solutions are some ways
that may help you reduce your energy bill and be Green IT oriented. While Green
IT may be viewed as another “green” fad, the fact is that reducing your
company’s energy bill will not only help your bottom line, it will also lead to
a reduction in your energy consumption, thereby reducing your CO2 emissions.
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