E-Cost Efficiencies

Last month I attended a conference where I met an old business colleague, who I havent seen for six years. George and I sat down over a meal and we talked about the changes in the respective business worlds. George mentioned that the increase in electricity prices were high and he needed more savings from his IT.

IT is sometimes treated as a cost for the business and increasing cost doesnt help.
 
 
I have often witnessed computer resources being wasted  so I shared with George ways in which he could save money and reduce wastage.
 
George had four physical servers in an air conditioned room used by sixty staff from Monday to Friday. 
Consider this, most corporate servers use 15% or less processing power. The memory rests 70% of the time and each server comsumes 550-850 Watts of power in an 24 x 7 air conditioned environment. 
 
3 Stages of Consolidation 
Businesses can benefit from three stages of virtualization by consolidating four differnt servers into one physical box
 
Cost Efficiency
Cost efficiencey can be achieved through buying a single(larger server) and running a virtualization program.
Virtualization options include :
  • ESXi (VMWare)
  • HyperV (Microsoft)
  • XenServer (Citrix)
The four servers can than be reloacted into the new virtual enviromnet as part of a "Phycical to Virtual" relocation. The old server is then removed. This brings about immediate savings. The power consumption is reduced by 60 to 70% and less heat is emmited from the Server therefore the air conditioner works less and consumes less power
 
Quality of Service
For redundancy, a second server and software to switch accross the virtual servers to the second physical server can be purchased.This increases the quality of IT service. 
 
Business Agility
Larger businesses use Infastructure as a Serveice (IAAS) providing appkications internally. This is used to provide interdepartmental billing, track resources. 
 
I called George last Friday. He only needed to progress to stage two "quality of service". He thanked me and said "My Savings are worth it"