If I do nothing what will be the result?

doing nothing costs the earth

OPEX

Most organisations we deal with have between 30 and 500 physical servers. For the sake of simplicity let's take 50 servers as an example for our calculations.

In the present ecomic climate these figures will go out of date quite quickly but I think you can count on the fuel costs, space costs and salaries being figures that will increase even if Moore's Law drives the hardware costs down somewhat.

A typical server consumes between 750 Watts and 2,000 Watts depending on size, numbers processors, disks and wether or not there is any redundancy in power supplies etc. Let's take an average of 1,375 Watts.

90% of this consumption is dissipated as heat with the remainder noise and mechanical energy. So our 50 servers generate 61.875 KW of heat.

To maintain efficiency we remove this heat from the data centre usually by air conditioning. The problem is air conditioning is not 100% efficient. You dont' get 1 KW of cooling for 1KW of power consumed by the air conditioning plant especially on warm days! The best average we can expect is about 30% efficiency so to get rid of 61.875KW we need another 206.25KW! So what does this cost us?

On current costs of 10 pence per Kilowatt hour (KWH) PLUS Climate Change Levy of 0.456 pence per KWH

A litle simple arithmatic helps - (61.875 + 206.25) x £0.10456 = £28.04 per hr.

Now run that 24 hrs per day 365 days per year = £245,630.40 each and every year!

That's 1,841.93 tons of Carbon Dioxide p.a. or 5,526 trees (American Forests calculation)

(Even with all 500W 'Lite' servers it would be £88,073.13 p.a. or 669.81 tons of Carbon Dioxide p.a. or 2,009 trees)

Add to that the cost of maintenance and support - I'll leave you to quantify that for your own organisation but I bet it takes the figure well over £300,000 p.a.

CAPEX

OK so you have the best purchasing department in the world and Moore's Law works for you. Never the less, you will be refreshing your server estate every 3.5 years on average. So that's 50 x £1,000 = £50,000 in capital expenditure as well.

OPERATIONAL EFFICIENCY

With 50 servers how many service outages can you expect particuarly as the estate ages towards the MTBF of the hardware? What's the cost of an outage? Well 99.9% availability sounds great but actually that's 500 minutes per year for every user depending on the downed server.

Let's say we have only 20 users per server and only one of our servers goes down in the year (a very conservative hypothesis) - that's still 10,000 minutes of lost productivity and at what cost to the organisation in terms of cash, reputation and customer retention?

CONCLUSION

Sit on your hands and spend £800,000 over the next 3 years for no gain or virtualise and save more than half of that figure improving operational efficiency and at the same time basking in the warm glow of going green!