IT departments have largely been ignored in organisational efforts to reduce energy and ultimately CO2 emissions. This is unfortunate when you consider that information technology equates to around 15% of the total energy of the average organisation and as much as 40% in financial services organisations and technology centric companies.
So why does IT use so much energy? Fairly simple really. An average PC and monitor when left on draws anything between 80W (latest technology with LCD monitor) and 250W (older technology with CRT monitor). This equates to between two and six 40W light bulbs burning constantly. Why constantly? Largely because most IT organisations still insist that users leave their machines on overnight for management purposes.
When you move into the server and data centre environment, you are looking at individual machines drawing between 200W and 2 500W. Now start to extrapolate the number of PCs and servers in your organisation and you will understand what all this technology is costing you. Simply put, an average PC and monitor will consume around 1 000 kilowatt hours per annum which costs approximately R450 to run at an average energy cost of R0.45c per kilowatt hour. Now multiply that by thousands for a large organisation.
Your company has the opportunity to save between 5% (average) and 13% (technology-centric) of your entire energy bill, merely by implementing two technologies - server virtualisation in the form of VMware and enterprise PC power management technology in the form of NightWatchman. Gartner data suggests that the average IT organisation consumes 39% of its energy on PCs and monitors and 23% on the servers and cooling. Let us tackle the PCs and monitors first.
NightWatchman can save as much as 50% of the energy in the PC and monitor environment. It does this my simply powering down infrastructure overnight when not in use. If the IT department does want to implement a patch or virus definition update, the solution has the ability to wake the machine up. Savings are potentially enormous but 50% is a good number. If you extrapolate this back to the total energy usage, implementing this solution can save as much as 3% of the total energy bill of an average organisation and 8% of a technology-centric company.
Now for the servers. VMware allows you to run multiple virtual servers on one physical device. For the layman this means that I can get rid of physical infrastructure and have fewer machines, thus saving energy. VMware claims up to 80% savings in terms of energy costs but let's be conservative and use 50% again. Using the Gartner data above, if we extrapolate this we can save anywhere between 2% and 5% of the total energy of the company.
Two relatively simple solutions that can save together, between 5% and 13% of your total energy bill depending on the type of organisation. Importantly, this is just the tip of the iceberg as IT historically has always been geared towards driving efficiency opportunities within the business. The opportunities that present themselves within the low carbon economy are no different. Importantly however, IT will need to continually measure business benefit and return on investment. In conclusion, can you afford to keep your IT department in the dark any longer?
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