Here at Mediaburst, we don’t pretend to understand the relationship between man made CO2 and changes in the climate, but we do recognise that wasted energy equals wasted profits and filling cabinets with lots of redundant servers then cooling them is neither environmentally friendly nor cost effective.
This financial year we set ourselves a challenge to reduce our office energy bill by at least 25%. In terms of electricity, the largest user in the office and the first target was our comprehensive development and test environment of 10 ‘old’ servers.
But how do you create a development and realistic test environment for a dual site clustered Bulk SMS platform using fewer servers than the production service? The answer is with two high spec servers and, as you already know, hardware-assisted virtualisation.
To make the fast servers we simply fitted new motherboards, quad core CPUs and fast RAM into two existing chassis’ saving the cost of buying new cases, power supplies and drives. This left us with 8 redundant servers and a few leftover components.
Electricity
The old development and test platforms spanned 10 servers using a total of approximately 1.8kW direct power and air conditioning at an estimated 2kWh continuous consumption costing about £3,662 per annum in electricity and taking up over 24U of rack space.
Our new virtualised platform is 2 servers at approx 500W total, saving 1.4kW or approx £1,350 per annum plus an estimated saving of £964 per annum on air conditioning.
Space
Old setup = 10x servers @ 24U
New virtualisations = 2x servers @ 6U
Therefore we’ve cleared out half a rack of heat and noise 
New equipment
Total £1,200, however we also managed to sell off the old servers on ebay for approx £600, leaving us only £600 out of pocket.
Licensing
Thankfully, not an issue as we already have the platform covered and the two host servers are using the free VMWare vSphere Hypervisor.
Estimated total savings
First year £1,714
Second year £2,314
Now, time to go find a more energy efficient kettle!
Not a bad start if you’re trying to reduce energy use by 25%. Scary when you think about how much energy we waste.
I wonder how much the country as a whole would save if we all made some simple changes.
Good work, you’ve inspired me to look at our energy bill and see what we can do.