IT Infrastructure Energy Efficiency

Minimize the energy cost of the on-premises datacenter by 30%.

PROBLEM

Over the years, businesses tend to accumulate a lot of hardware inside of their infrastructure. What is common to many – they lose track of what actually makes money and what burns money. Eventually, server rooms fill up with racks of appliances and complex webs of cables that are scary to look at.

Sometimes you may hear – “This works, so don’t touch it!” It frequently comes from veteran IT admins that were born and will retire from the same organization.

So what do you do when you are forced to raise price tags for your products to stay afloat but don’t want to lose customers? You do exactly the opposite of what those admins tell you – scrutinize and question the purpose of each piece of tech in your facility. Make your IT more efficient and free up funds that will help you to postpone price hikes for as long as you can. Such a strategy will help you maintain a competitive posture on the market while your competitors are losing customers due to price increase.

This short article demonstrates a high-level overview of how some house cleaning in an on-premises data center can reduce your number on the energy bills.

EXAMPLE

Below is an example of electrical bills for one branch of an organization where my team removed most of the energy hogs.

We compared electrical bills for the past couple of months after work was partially completed and the result showed that we saved on average 30%, compared to the same months year before. We actually went to facility management and confirmed that there were no major appliances upgraded/removed or electrical work being done since last year in the facility.

To achieve this result we did the following:

removed 1.5 heavy-duty construction garbage bags of cables;
sent 1 skid of hardware to recycling;
threw out 2 out 3 server racks
repositioned remaining server rack
rearranged hardware to optimize cable runs
redesigned network backbone to minimize the number of cables used
conducted P2V migrations
retired services and servers that were long ago replaced with cloud solutions

Our goal is to cut energy consumption to 40% once we complete the optimization of the environment.

MAXIMIZE EFFICIENCY TIPS

If you are to take up the challenge of optimizing your Infrastructure performance, then check the list of areas that helped my team to increase energy efficiency.

Quick Win

Optimize your cabling routes and ensure your airflow is not obstructed:
- Remove cables that are no longer used;
- Use short cables wherever possible. You may need to re-arrange your appliances for this to work;
- Make sure cables are organized and not hanging loose.
Inspect your datacenter for equipment that no longer is used:
- We found quite a few devices and servers that nobody knew anything about;
- In some cases, techs were afraid to touch them because someone said in the past that those devices are business-critical systems. Have a better look at those, and you may be surprised to find that no one used it for years.
Get rid of the powered off equipment and misc items sitting around the room:
- All of that accumulates heat or obstructs airflow;
- Server rooms are for servers, don’t use them to store junk.
See if some equipment can be repositioned to get better cooling:
- Cold air must come from the front and hot air should come out at the rear of your appliances;
- Ideally, you want cold air to come up from the floor, hitting storage appliances at the bottom of the rack first, then servers and other equipment at the top.
Shut down legacy systems that require only occasional access.

Virtualize your Hardware

Many businesses run on-prem virtual infrastructure. USE IT!
- Investigate how much resources your physical servers are consuming;
- Optimize your virtual infrastructure to free up resources for new VMs after P2V conversion;
- Perform P2V conversions.
Identify legacy servers that may be providing the same service as newer systems in your virtual infrastructure and merge them:
- Many vendors come in, implement something new, and nobody ever goes back to complete the transition with proper decommissioning of legacy systems.

Merge with Cloud Services

What many organizations do not realize is that cloud services they already committed to also include more features than they actually use or know about. For example: in my article about Cloud File System I describe how the number of file servers can be replaced by Office 365 SharePoint Online. Some organizations I dealt with, run large storage appliances in their on-prem datacenters. Most of those servers and storage appliances are using SAS or SATA drives that release a lot of heat. Cooling them down will require a considerable amount of energy.

Spend some time to learn what you already pay for and you’ll be surprised how much can be done without added cost to your subscription.

Datacenter consisting of 6 racks such as this one required on average to have 1 dead hard drive replaced weekly.

You wonder why?