Times are interesting when it comes to power consumption and hardware disposal. We’ve got all sorts of "green" concerns. We’re got pressure to reduce our carbon footprints to reduce CO2 emissions. Even if you’re part of the GWB camp and don’t believe in CO2 related global warming then you can’t argue against the need to conserve resources, e.g. avoid wasteful trashing of hardware which contains precious (yes!) and toxic materials. And even if you don’t care about your environment, I bet you care about your bank account. It is inevitable that we will see regulations tightening on the consumption of power and disposal of hardware. There will be costs for needless wastage. There’s some things we can do to limit our exposure here.
I’ve previously mentioned that you can recycle your old hardware. There are charities that will gladly take your old servers and PC’s, even those 8 year old ones, recondition them and send them off to the farthest reaches of the planet with Ubuntu Linux on them for use in charities and schools. Some charities will even securely wipe your hard disks for you. You can make sure you limit your risk here by using a free secure wiping tool like DBAN. There’s a few advantages to using a recycling solution like this. You get to give your hardware away and probably take some sort of tax break. You get to dispose of your hardware for free. Normal legal disposal actually costs a bit of money these days and that’s likely to increase in price per unit. Finally, you get to feel good about doing something that will benefit someone in need.
What about operating costs of current infrastructure? Hosting data centers have already started moving in the direction of a solution. Companies like IBM are making big claims about the power consumption and heat generation levels of their Blade servers. Think about this. You get a denser CPU per Rack U infrastructure, e.g. the HP C class can have 64 dual CPU servers (equivalent of a 2 disk slot DL360) in a 42 U rack. That’s less real estate being used. OK – it’s not all that much less but it sure is if you fill a row of racks. Power consumption over a long period is claimed to be reduced. That means you’re getting a lower hit from any potential carbon emission related charges. We all now that power costs are one of the big operating costs right now and that they are only going to get higher. Heat generation is a big concern too because it requires some sort of cooling mechanism which can consume a great deal of power. If you can reduce your server related heat then you can reduce that cost. Once you install an operating system onto your powered on blades, the do become pretty efficient. Just don’t get confused by standing behind a rack of powered on blades that don’t have an operating system. It can get pretty hot back there because there is no management software installed.
Hardware virtualisation such as VMware Virtual Infrastructure (ESX, etc) or Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V also brings something to the table. Think about all of your servers. How many of them need all of the resources they have? Your only hardware bottlenecks are typically memory and disk. CPU is probably rarely above 10% on the majority of servers. Why not consolidate that resource and save on server real estate? Virtualise only those servers that are candidates. Don’t be fooled by some consultant into virtualising everything. I worked on a site where they did and their server services performance levels were horrific. A thing to consider here is tha your abstraction of hardware makes your virtualised servers mobile so hardware is not a concern during hardware failure (VMware VMotion or Windows 2008 clustering) and hardware replacement becomes easier. On the green side, you have less server hardware so you have less green related charges when disposing of server hardware. You’ve also got even denser server per Rack U installations which reduces real estate costs, power consumption and cooling related costs.
We can take this a step further with Virtual Desktop Infrastructure. Why have 500 desktops when you can virtualise those onto 16 servers as virtual machines? You’ve not only reduced hardware ownership and disposal costs but you’ve also minimised those green costs too. Not to mention you’ve got a simple to manage and deploy infrastructure using solutions such as a VDI broker.
IT staff of SME’s are reading this thinking "how the hell a I going to afford a blade and SAN infrastructure?". Simple … outsource! You don’t have to outsource your staff … just the hosting of your servers. You save in loads of ways. Look at the big room hosting your servers right now. It’s consuming lots of space and increasing your rent costs. You have to buy and maintain cooling and fire suppression systems. Why not share all those costs and your new blade and SAN infrastructure costs by outsourcing the hosting of your servers?
I’ve probably given you a few things to think about there. Whether you like it or not, green related costs are going to increase. Acting now could prevent or minimise those cost impacts on your organisation.
EDIT:
I realised there was some more I could talk about on power conservation. We’ll never 100% remove desktops and laptops from the network. VDI isn’t for everyone either. We have all seen company emails instructing us to turn off our PC’s and monitors when we go home in the evening. Almost no one does it. If you have Windows Vista deployed then you can use group policy to manage power settings of those machines. Consider that a desktop should be powered off 98 hours of the week then you can see how you might save some money by upgradig to Vista!