Clean Your Datacenter, Cut Your Electric Bill? - Page 2

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Clean house

The next thing that has to be done is get your house in order, literally. Many datacenters are full of gear that is orphaned, not used, redundant or abandoned. The most famous example came in 2001, when the University of North Carolina found a missing NetWare server that had been accidentally walled in by construction workers some four years earlier.

The server kept running right along without a hitch, a testament to the company that made it, even though the school's admins had no idea where it was.

Uptime estimates that between 15 and 30 percent of what is consuming power in your datacenter right now can be turned off with no harmful effect. "A lot of these companies have no clear inventory of what they've got," said Brill. "Servers are cheap, so who cares about keeping track of them? But the long-term effect of not caring is becoming a consequence."

Secondly, virtualization should be done on low-utilization servers. "Proper utilization is an asset," said Brill. Many servers are running at literally one to three percent utilization, which is to say, they are idling. "How do you defend one to three percent of an asset?"

Through combined management, proper inventory and virtualization, Uptime found a 40,000 square foot datacenter can, over a four year period, save $144 million in expenses, reduce 112,000 tons of greenhouse gas emissions and save six megawatts of power.

Much of these findings were culled last year, but the organization has a symposium in New York City this coming April, where a number of firms will present the results of their reorganizations with the Uptime strategies.