Climbing energy costs are forcing companies to adopt a long-term ICT strategy to trim power consumption.
This follows Eskom's electricity tariff hikes of 24.8% from April, and another 25.8% next year, and 25.9% the year after.
Rohil Dayaram, Think IT Solutions pre-sales technical advisor, says: “Managers can no longer argue that the size of the company prohibits them from significant enough savings to justify changing their systems. Size is irrelevant in this game - everyone can and should be looking at their consumption and carbon footprint and making concrete plans to reduce both.”
Dayaram points out that desktop virtualisation is one of the most cost-effective systems for reducing power consumption. “Zero clients represent the most cost-effective system as its lack of moving parts reduces power consumption to as low as four watts, whereas more conventional systems generally use up to 200 watts of power.”
Zero client equipment has a longer life cycle of six to 10 years, compared to three to four years of conventional desktop PCs. Dayaram explains investment in upgrades and new services are restricted to the back-end system; requiring investment only in one area versus across 20 or more workstations.
Server rooms are also one of the biggest consumers of electricity. Dayaram suggests companies run in-rack cooling, rather than cooling the entire server room environment. “Alternatively, a simple solution is to adjust the cooling requirements according to the usage of the equipment; why run the air conditioning at full capacity when the servers are under-utilised outside of office hours,” says Dayaram.
He adds that building intelligence into devices that are traditional power-hogs is a smart way to reduce energy consumption.
“Not switching off machines, monitors, or even sessions on the server while staff are not in the office is criminal,” he notes. “Every person can make a contribution by being aware of their own personal usage patterns and consumption, and reducing this by even a few watts will go a long way to making an entire organisation more energy efficient.”
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