Minimising IT Operational Costs "Green Computing"

Working with us to adopt these techniques resulted in our customer achieving:-

Hardware cost reductions ranging from 28 to 53 percent.

Operations cost reductions ranging from 72 to 79 percent.

Overall cost reductions ranging from 29 to 80 percent.

IT operational costs can be briefly summarised as:-

Power and Cooling

All equipment requires electrical power and most generate heat as a by-product of operation. Cooling systems are less than 100% efficient and consume power themselves. The upshot is that even a very small server requires the equivalent of 1.5KW of power and cooling. Using an average tariff of 10.5p per KW hour a server in continuous use will cost annually £(1.5x24x365x0.105) per year ie. £1,379.70 + vat per year.

Reducing the number of servers saves hardware and power costs.

Equipment

Hardware is essential but is expensive to own and maintain. Most equipment becomes redundant after a few years and will be replaced.

Reducing the numbers of pieces of equipment needed is important to cost reduction.

Support and Management

Support and Management costs are linked to people costs. It doesn't matter whether these costs are direct payroll costs or the cost of buying in support and management. Either way steps can be taken to control and/or reduce this otherwise ever increasing burden.

Reducing the need for support and management is the easiest path to savings.

Licencing

Organisations usually have more licences than they need. It is common to see rooms with licenced computers unattended or not in use.

Reducing the number of licences by adopting a concurrent licencing model is a simple way to save costs.

Availability

Systems that go off-line cost business productivity and profit. High profile businesses can have their reputations damaged and their share price affected. It doesn't matter whether the down-time is planned or unplanned.

High availability is a must for reducing costs assosciated with down-time.

Access

In order to have applications perform satisfactorily organisations often purchase more bandwidth than they actually need.

Reducing the bandwidth required for good performance is an obvious cost saving.

Security

Poor security gives rise to costs in many ways. Viruses, Malware,Phishing attacks cause disruption and consume business resources. Data security is of paramount concern both from the point of availability and of regulatory compliance.

Providing good security reduces the costs associated with these risks

Space

Wherever the IT equipment is located it occupies space that often could be put to other uses or even vacated.

Space costs money so reducing the need for it is a clear path to saving.

The solutions include:-

Moving to shared IT resources
Initiating consolidation projects
Adopting new data centre technologies