Most European governments agreed to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide output with 20% in the year 2010. There will be all kinds of legislation that will force business and private persons to reach this in combination with increasing prices. At this time almost 5% percent of the global energy consumption is IT related. This power is used for personal PC's, internet, servers and cooling in data centres. According to recent studies this amount is similar to that of the aviation industry.
About Grontmij
Grontmij Information Management operates 250 servers spread in the central data centre and our local offices. A modern server consumes 500KW - 24 hours a day, 365 days a year - but mostly is not used to the full extend. We decided to take action; from a durability perspective, but also for economical reasons with ever increasing cost of energy, and the announced legislation which requires businesses to reduce energy consumption with at least 2% per year.
Some time ago we decided to use servers which are optimised for power management and also have a good track record for durable production and recyclability. As a result of this decision we were able to put software in place to manage the power consumption of this servers. Depending on the age of the server we reduced the power consumption in various cases to only 20% of its traditional use. Since there is also less heat production the power consumption for cooling will also decrease.
Reduction
This will reduce the yearly consumption of power ultimately with 1,5 million kWh per year which is an output reduction of almost a metric ton carbon oxide (CO2) per year. In financial figures this is about € 1200,00 per server per year at the present price level, which is expected to increase drastically in the next years (20% for 2008 is expected).
For the office budget this will be a straightforward cost reduction of the energy bill.
Green data cells
Many IT functions allready have been consolidated to fewer servers and centralisation of storage. However we will proceed this process by using blade servers and server virtualisation.
Together with our data housing partner, being a member of the green grid consortium, we will start a program to investigate and move to closed water cooled cabinets which are more efficient for cooling than the commonly used open air cooled cabinets.
More can be done
An average nowadays desktop consumes about 300W. Assuming it is turned on for an average of 8 hours a day, 48 weeks a year, it is consuming 575kWh of power. This is the equivalent of 360 gram CO2 per year and some € 115,00 out of our pocket to the power company. Since we have over 7000 computers in our company this means a present energy consumption of 4 million kWh (2,5 metric ton CO2) and € 800.000 per year. We assume this can be reduced during the next years by 25% when we take energy into account when choosing our PC’s and start using power management software and be critical towards the use of screen savers that prevent power to be stepped down.
To realize this we recently have been evaluating modern developments in desktop PCs concerning energy consumption, durability and recyclability and of course performance, quality and price. We expect to be able to offer a new line of PC’s that will save us money and get us green shortly.