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CHAPTER

Minimizing Power Usage

sk any parent of teenagers and they will tell you that their kids think electricity
flows from the wall for free. But it’s not free, and mom and dad know it. Cellular
Atelephones, computers, iPods, and whatever else the kids plug in add up in
electricity costs. It’s costly enough at home, but the issue is even more pronounced in an
organization.
Sure, a couple computers here and there take their toll, but what if you’ve got hundreds
of computers, or even thousands? And don’t forget the servers and networking gear used to
support those workstations (and the necessity to cool those servers, see Chapter 4). To make
matters worse, industrywide, costs are going up.
According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA’s) 2006 datacenter
energy efficiency report, in 2006, the total amount of power used by datacenters represented
approximately 1.5 percent of total U.S. electricity consumption. The cost totaled US$4.5
billion, about as much as was spent by 5.8 million average households for the year—US
EPA, July 2007.

NOTE According to a 2007 study by Gartner Group, information and communications technology
accounts for 2 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions, which is roughly the equivalent of what
the airline industry produces.

The fact of the matter is that your computers use juice, and that juice costs you money.
To save a lot of money—and to help the environment in the process—you need to reduce
how much electricity you use. And to reduce how much electricity you use, you need to
know how much you’re using and where it can be trimmed.
This chapter looks at the issue of power consumption and offers some recommendations
to reduce it across your IT department’s infrastructure, from servers to workstations.

Power Problems

Power is a huge issue for businesses. Forget for a moment that this book is largely about
minimizing your IT department’s impact on the environment, and look at it from a cost
point of view. For no other reason than saving a lot of money, energy efficiency is important.
But even beyond saving the planet and saving money, you need to save power, because
at some point, you may not have enough power to run your equipment.

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