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Green savings
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Going green makes business sense, particularly in
tough economic times.
Simon Williams discovers that saving the planet means saving money.
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It’s not often that doing something for the good of your business is directly in line with doing something positive for the environment, but cutting energy use fits both bills. If you can reduce the amount of energy expended in your business, costs will drop in direct proportion. There are plenty of ways to reduce energy use, of course, but here we’re particularly concerned with energy used in IT.
This is a significant section of business energy use. According to government statistics, the UK service sector used around 18 million tonnes of oil equivalent (Mtoe) energy in 2007, of which 15 per cent (around 1.2Mtoe) was for computing and cooling alone.
Cutting back on these two energy uses - the computers themselves and the energy used to cool them - makes a direct impact on company costs. Cutting back on energy use by making things more efficient can bring secondary savings too, which may not be immediately obvious. If you can increase the energy efficiency of front and back-office computing, you may not need to increase hardware resources as quickly as you thought, which can save capital expenditure on the kit, cooling equipment and even the buildings necessary to house them.
There are plenty of ways of achieving these savings, but starting in the front office, economies can often be made by careful choice of hardware and how it’s set up.
Office savings
Energy saving is not only about improving efficiencies in huge data centres, although they do account for a high proportion of overall energy use in larger companies. There are also economies to be made in any office where computers and printers are in regular use.
Windows 7 can be a lot more energy-efficient than Windows XP and even Vista. Although it may need a more powerful PC to run than XP, in tests they both take about the same amount of power doing typical office work such as word processing. However, it’s when the machine’s not in use (which is most of the time for a typical office PC) that most savings can be made.
Independent tests commissioned by Microsoft have revealed that a typical Windows Vista installation can save around £35 per system per year. This is thanks to its improved sleep and
Microsoft Dublin Data Centre
The new data centre Microsoft has built in Dublin to host many of its cloud computing services, and the Microsoft Business Productivity Online Suite in particular, uses a number of techniques to increase energy efficiency and reduce running costs. While smaller companies won’t be able to make this kind of investment, they can still take advantage of these efficiencies by using the cloud services.
The server racks in Microsoft’s Dublin data centre use filtered, external air for cooling, rather than artificially cooled water.cloud services.
To start with, the centre uses air handling units, mounted on the roof, to suck in outside air for use in air-conditioning. Where many centres are forced to use water cooling, because of high external summer temperatures, under Dublin’s normal climate this free cooling can be used throughout the year. The energy requirements are reduced to fanning the air around, rather than artificially cooling it. As part of the system, it’s important to keep cool input air separate from warmer exhaust air and the structure of the data centre itself is built with this in mind. Cool air is sucked in from the roof into the server rooms, where it’s directed through the server racks, before being sucked out through separate ducts and returned to the outside world. hibernation modes which use less energy than earlier versions. Windows 7 is even more efficient, though it’s too new for equivalent test results to be available.
As an aside, these tests also established that screen savers use more power than blank screens, so you have to balance the aesthetics of star-fields or company logos against the cost savings.
The easiest way to save is to implement a sleep and hibernation regime, so that desktop PCs which are not in use, because of work breaks or staff being out of the office, automatically move to low-power states. This is easier to do under Windows 7 than under XP and it’s also more straightforward to wake a sleeping Windows 7 PC in the middle of the night, to perform a network-based upgrade.
If a company directive to shut down PCs before leaving the office doesn’t encourage people to be more energy-conscious, then consider a third-party application. Verdiem Surveyor 4.0 and NightWatchman can perform network-wide shut down of PCs, including saving open documents and closing down running applications so they can be reinstated when the computer is reawakened. (See panel for a simple way to do this in an office with just a few PCs.)
The paperless office may have been a myth of the 1970s and 1980s, but there are things you can do to reduce the amount of paper used and make better use of the pages that are printed. Most obvious is to implement a recycling scheme, where used paper is collected so that it can be pulped and the pulp re-used. Virtually any size of office should have this type of scheme.
The next stage is to buy printers which can ‘duplex’, or print on both sides of the paper in one job. If you then set duplex as the default print mode for any such printer, you get close to twice the paper utilisation at a stroke. In a similar way, if you set colour printers to default to black printing, so that a conscious choice has to be made to switch to colour, you can save on more expensive colour toners.
Those in small offices, who use inkjet printers rather than lasers, should check out InkSaver 2, an easy-to-use application which produces a high quality pseudo-draft mode on popular printer models. You can select ink savings of up to 75 per cent, though 30 per cent is a more practical limit if you want little visible difference in print quality. The program is fully compatible with Windows.
Replacing office hardware
Other energy savings on the desktop may already be happening as a by-product of the continuous cycle of PC depreciation and replacement. Moving from old-style CRT monitors to new LCD flat
Cheap and Cheerful
auto-shutdown If you only have a few machines in your network then you can create an automatic shutdown routine to save power overnight using nothing more than two built-in Windows features. Using Professional or Ultimate versions of Windows XP onward, run the Task Scheduler from Accessories, System Tools and create a new task, set to repeat daily at whatever time you want the machine to shut down. The task needs to be set to run the internal Windows program ‘shutdown’. Use the parameters ‘-s -f’ after the function name for a full shutdown, where any running applications are forced to close first. If you then want your computers to start up at a preset time, perhaps at 8:30 before staff reach the office, you can start this with a wake-up call within the BIOS of each machine. Most BIOSs support this ‘wake on alarm’ and it’s simply a question of switching the function on and setting a time. Different BIOSs put the relevant settings in slightly different menus, but they’re not difficult to find. This technique is only really suitable for small numbers of PCs as it has to be set up on each machine individually. Larger networks can make use of the new policy settings available in Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2.panels automatically saves energy. A typical CRT monitor uses about 150W while awake and around 30W in sleep mode. For an LCD monitor, the figures are more like 60W and 5W.
The swing from desktop to laptop PCs has a similar effect, as even the smaller micro desktop machines take noticeably more power than their notebook cousins. A micro-desktop with a 17-inch LCD monitor will typically take around 200W, while an equivalent 17-inch laptop is more likely to take 70 to 90W.
Most people have already made savings to their domestic electricity bills, by switching to low-energy light bulbs and turning equipment off at night. Few should object to similar policies in the office.
Hosted services
If you run a smaller IT operation, you may well be able to save considerably by using a hosted solution. As well as the savings in floor space and IT personnel, you can take advantage of the economies of scale that a dedicated hosting site
can provide because it is hosting the computing resources of multiple companies. Look into their energy management claims when comparing hosting companies, as you may be able to make cost savings at the same time as improving your overall energy footprint.
One key advantage of hosted services is that an increase in your IT requirements can often be achieved much more economically as the service provider will nearly always have spare capacity built in as part of their business model, allowing them to accommodate new customers or to cope with the extended needs of existing users. Obtaining and setting up new equipment in-house could take a lot longer than running your data into a new bank of hosting servers.
However the comparison of local against hosted IT services is never simple and will depend on many factors, including non-technical issues such as the level of security required on the data to be stored.
Multi-core savings
If you run servers, whether it’s a couple of boxes in the corner of your office to a room full of blades, you need to think ‘consolidation’. By specifying multi-core processors, now available in both Intel Xeon and AMD Opteron products, you can save considerable energy compared with more systems using fewer cores. Although a four-core processor takes more power than a two-core one, the increase isn’t proportional so you’re gaining at both the server box and the rack level.
For example, only a couple of years ago Intel’s two-core, 3.4GHz 7140M Xeon processor was rated at 150W, or around 75W per core; while the current, four-core, 2.93GHz X7350 Xeon is rated at 130W, or 33W per core. There are now six-core Xeons available as well (at a price) which bring the power consumption per core down to 22W.
Return Programme
Most printer companies have return programmes for their consumables, but Lexmark’s involves a small cash incentive as well as free facilities for posting back cartridges or even for collection from larger companies. Lexmark’s Return Programme cartridges are roughly 20 per cent cheaper than the company’s ‘regular’ cartridges. All you need is people prepared to put them in bags or boxes and stick them in the post.
On top of the benefits of multi-core processors, Intel implements Intelligent Power Capability which means it can dynamically throttle back power on any cores that are not in use, so reducing energy consumption when a core is idling.
AMD does much the same with its four-core Opteron processors, using its CoolCore technology to independently adjust the frequency of each of the cores. The processor’s AMD-V technology enables fast switching between virtual machines, so increasing the number that any single processor can host.
Some large corporations have made dramatic reductions in the energy used by their data centres. 75 percent power reductions aren’t uncommon, saving companies millions of dollars per year. They’ve done this by consolidating servers, sometimes by up to 40 percent and storage devices by up to 70 percent. In the process they’ve halved their data centre floor areas, saving millions of dollars in extra construction costs.
Although multi-core processors can mean fewer blades and fewer racks, it’s not all good news as each processor dissipates more heat, which means you may need additional cooling. The latest, four-core and six-core processors are also more expensive, chip for chip, than their older cousins, so you have to balance the space and energy gains against the possible increased costs of kit and cooling.
When you look at the core costs, though, and take cost reductions in energy use over the life of the servers, you should find it comparatively easy to make the case for fewer servers, blades and racks.
Virtual machines
One of the driving forces behind consolidation is the increasing use of virtualisation in server design. By creating virtual machines (VMs), which can run whatever operating systems are needed as complete encapsulated software systems, the requirement for specific hardware to handle bespoke applications lessens.
Using virtual machines, which can draw on resources as needed to run particular applications, you can set up powerful data centres using off-the-peg servers. A server farm built of dozens or even hundred of blades can run many virtual machines at once and offers a big advantage over mainframes and dedicated servers.
Virtual machines can be created and disposed of on demand, so individual servers no longer have to be dedicated to particular tasks. Server efficiencies, which in the past have often run at between 3 and 5 per cent because of long periods of idle time, can be boosted using virtualisation to figures approaching 100 percent. Rather than sitting kicking their heels until called on, virtualised servers can switch to other tasks freely and quickly, so you get a lot more computing work for the same amount of electrical energy.
Vizioncore’s vOptimizer can monitor and control the size and use of virtual
machines and align them on 64K boundaries.
With the improved support for virtual machines in Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2, their use will grow and managing the resources used for hosting VMs will inevitably get more complex. One way of easing the load and reducing waste is Vizioncore’s vOptimizer which can scan your servers and show you where resources are not being fully utilised. The WasteFinder program is free to download, telling you where the greatest savings can be made and tempting you to invest in the vOptimizer itself.
 vOptimizer Pro manages the virtual machines on your servers, allowing you to allocate specific amounts of storage to each VM. It also checks that all your VMs line up on 64K boundaries, so ensuring they run at full speed. Saving virtual machine storage space means it can be used elsewhere, giving you more effective computing power on the same hardware and maybe deferring the cost of additional server capacity.
VMware continues to be the best-known virtual machine software, but the company offers more than just a VM manager, which enables you to create and save specific configurations of virtual machine, complete with their guest operating systems. There are tools for deploying virtual machines over an enterprise network, packaging tools for setting up specific applications in their own VM, and measurement and analysis tools to help allocate charges to departments or business sections for their VM use.
Buying new computers and servers with an eye on their energy consumption has never been a more sensible move. While keeping all their other specifications in mind, you should go for kit with the lowest power use and best hibernation strategies, and then use modern virtualisation techniques to keep your back-office resources well utilised. It could save you thousands of pounds sterling a year, and hundreds of thousands of pounds of carbon for the planet.
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SIMON
WILLIAMS
Simon Williams is a full time technology journalist and has been explaining technologies and reviewing IT products since the early 1980s. When not writing, he dons sandals and an Arran sweater and sings in folk clubs. (Photo by Amy Boswood.)
simonw@hardcopymag.com |
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