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My company is trying to save energy and cut costs in our network. What are some of the best ways to accomplish that without disrupting our work environment?
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8 Answers
There are numerous ideas available but since there have been two I have successfully implemented I will mention them:
1) Staggered startup / smart lights - essentially when you power up all of your electrical items at the beginning of the day, your consumption spikes! Guess what your local utility company (eg. GE, Duke, Cinergy) will charge you at - the spike. The trick is to space out the start up on everything with a lapse of 2-3 minutes. This will be enough of a stagger (is that a word?) to lower your spike and lower cost/carbon footprint. Any decent programmer can set up a DOS unit only PC from overflow to allow for this.
The idea of smart lights is similar to motion detector lighting you may use in your home. Siemens have developed a technology for this and if you are, for instance, on a single floor in an office building you can potentially induce the owber of the property to implement this on a test phase with yourselves as the test subject.
2) Smart roof - I took a contractor that specialized in roof structure and load support and got him to put a green roof (eg. sod, solar panels to the hot water tanks) that lowered heating costs (sod roof = R3000 property and the average home is R2000 or less), lowered carbon footprint as the sod absorbed the light energy. Only drawback for a retail operation was that the manager had to weed wack it each week - but what an excuse to get fresh air.
If you google the phrase "office energy efficiencies" or a derivation of this you will also find other items you may wish to explore. Both of the above had cost involved but the ROI was low in time and with the Staggered Start Up item I showed a reduction in costs, year to date comparable, 25%.
Regards,
Mike
Andrea,
There are multiple things that your company can do to get green and save money, but one that we want to hit on is the efficiency of your data center. It might be expensive to make the transition, but your company will reap the ROI of a slashed energy bill and the rewards of a healthier work environment in the long run. Here is a great article from one of our users on Focus about 10 simple steps to turning your data center green.
http://www.focus.com/articles/servers-storage/10-simple-steps-green-datacenter/
A number of companies offer PC power management solutions--enabling administrators to set and enforce shut down policies on networked computers. The best of these solutions are flexible enough to accommodate differing work styles and requirements and integrate with other security and system management tools. These solutions can save up to $50 per PC per year in reduced electric bills and can qualify for utility company rebates and other incentives depending on your local situation.
Like I said, it's a competitive market with a number of players, but I can recommend that you give the solution from the company I work for, BigFix, Inc., a look. http://www.bigfix.com/content/power-management
Do you currently have a Mainframe Computer? Or a Power 5 system?
Many companies are looking at implementing Linux and eliminating servers by moving the workload to Linux on a Mainframe. I have seen companies eliminate over 200 servers, and consequently lower there power consumption, the reduce the air conditioning requirements and they save on floor space.
Just one idea.
Do you have any money? If not,
1) Save on backup space (back everything up and reduce what needs to be done). Improves speed of backup; possibly can take some servers off of backup; Improves DR. If you pay for backup; reduces cost.
2) Get rid of indiv. printers; many of the ones bought recently don't turn off. Assign someone to turn off TVs/printers etc on Friday and turn on in am
3) Replace monitors w/ more energy efficient flat screens
4) See if you can raise the a/c a few degrees and lower the heat
5) Do spot hardware survey; if large network; many extra machines left on and poss. able to be redeployed.
6) Use lower weight paper
7) Set up a standard power off (good for security and power)
Following options you may consider:
1)Install smart lightinh system which turns on light only when you are in that specific area.The server room for instance is a place where we don't stay for a long time, motion sensor detect your presence and accordingly switch on lights for specific area
2)Deploy vitualisation i.e a single stack of servers with multiple partition can cater to lot of applications.You may save on your hardware expenditure
3)Have power controlledd racks which can be rmotely monitored thus leting you exactly know how much each rack is consuming and you can remotely enable or diabale it
4)Go for Green IT Products which have lowest power consumption yet provide full functionality.There are lots of L2/L3 & Routers which are green compliant and Miercom certified
Hope it help ;-)
Jignesh
Data center virtualization is a great starting point, with no impact to the user community. While there is some investment into solution sets and implementation, the return on investment can be 10 fold. At a client of mine we were able to reduce a server farm of over 2000 machines to 886 machines. In doing so, the equipment was repurposed saving future costs, the power consumption of the data center was reduced, the the cooling systems required less energy to run, and there was actually a performance increase.
It is said, You can't move what you can't measure. Accordingly, how do you know that you need to cut costs. What metrics have you used to measure? Then it is imperative to engage your company and employees on stating what the current platform is, and then identify the measurement you want to reduce, actions they can take to drive this goal, and incentive/rewards for doing so. The company will not only benefit from the cost savings, but also from building a team platform for future goals and objectives. Studies show, that employees who feel connected to their companies or have a sense of ownership, tend to be more loyal, cost minded, and thus the potential for lower turnover exists.
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