Saving On IT Energy Consumption

By Carl Gill

Energy is a significant and rising expense for information technology. In fact, it can be as high as 25% of an IT budget. CIOs are under pressure to lower energy consumption.

Key drivers of this include:

  • Energy price increases and market volatility

  • Growing pressure to understand and report environmental and financial impacts of resource consumption

  • The complexity and expense of navigating the growing landscape of compliance requirements

What’s the solution?

  • Do you really need to leave our PC’s powered on all night long when nobody is here? This is a good place to start to lower energy consumption is computer shut down during nights/weekends & holiday's. Many companies do not shut their computers down which results in this unnecessary energy consumption, added costs and carbon emissions into the environment. While individual PC’s, printers, and LCDs don’t use much power, in aggregate they use a lot. In the USA 10% of base load electricity consumption is from AC/DC power converters. It is a simple effective response to an age old problem.

  • Execute a proactive carbon management strategy for sustained reduction. To do so effectively, a company needs to leverage a consistent, auditable process to assess the carbon baseline across their entire operations, set reduction goals, and establish a systematic way to develop and execute an abatement plan.

  • Virtualize as much as possible.

  • Cooling is the main power use factor that can be manipulated in a datacenter. Re-plumb chillers to allow Compressor bypass and use outside heat exchanger when the outside air temperature is low. Virtually every datacenter built six or more years ago runs chiller compressors for datacenter cooling when it is zero degrees outside!

  • Buy eco-certified equipment. Carbon labels for individual products are in the process of development by various entities around the world. In the meantime, tools such as EPEAT (Electronic Product Environmental Assessment Tool), Energy Star, Blue Angel (a German certification), and EcoLogo provide measure energy-efficiency and other sustainability attributes for ICT products.

You can find additional information at http://www.eweekeurope.co.uk/knowledge/knowledge-green-it/your-guide-to-the-top-5-green-energy-efficient-it-certifications-44