Greening Greater Toronto study finds that data center servers operate at only 4% average utilization: “The statement is the result of a recent “Green Exchange” meeting on greening IT practices hosted by Greening Greater Toronto in partnership with the Ontario Institute of the Purchasing Management Association of Canada.”

“One of the other lessons learned from the meeting is that central-control systems are more effective at reducing energy consumption than relying on employee practices. Purchasers who implemented employee training programs to have people turn off their machines at the end of the day reported maximum penetration rates of 65 percent, declining rapidly over time.”

“In contrast, most organizations have focused on control solutions, where IT staff program computers to turn off on a timed cycle. This is often matched with settings to turn off monitors or put computers into sleep-modes after a certain period of inactivity. Purchasers report almost no user resistance to these solutions and consider it part of a larger trend of centralizing control of individual computers over a network. Most purchasers have solved common concerns about timed off-cycles with a software-based solution like the NightWatchman or Surveyor Windows server monitoring software.”

When I was at Sun Microsystems (late 90’s-2000), I found similar results. When I asked the 40,000+ Sun community to turn off desktop monitors and computers at night, rarely did they, even though s study I commissioned showed the savings to be well into millions of dollars per year (as most were left on during nights and weekends and on average, employees were only at their desk about 4 hours per work day). But when I had a third party switching device (MonitorMiser) added to all desktops that automatically turned off monitors when desktops were inactive (no mouse or keyboard input for 15 minutes), only three people of over 40,000 complained. Savings = over $3,000,000 a year in US. (Most monitors were 17-24” CRTs, and each employee averaged over two as many had several.)

I then took this a step further and asked that the Operating System turn desktops off when inactive. This was a bit more challenging, as what was inactive to user input might be actively running code all night. So I had the software engineers put in some more code to look at processor state, network activity, and keep it user selectable. This was a very crude “sleep” mode for the OS and a beginning of those for the industry. The industry followed what we did I think not for energy savings, but because Sun sales engineers started selling computers on TCO including energy use and winning deals. The sales team was realizing by the late 90’s that lower total cost, and consequently lower energy use of the equipment, helped to make sales. These and other changes led to over $10,000,000 in annual energy savings I implemented and led to earning my second EPA EnergyStar Partner of the Year Award.

It’s been great to see this early and rather crude OS function automatically put monitors and desktops to sleep and/or off states. Wow! Now look at what our desktops, servers, even networking and storage equipment can do to help it reduce energy use when underutilized.
Take this one more evolutionary step forward, and you have what I call server power management software (1E, PowerAssure, Surveyor, and many others) that automatically determines hardware utilization and state, and either puts it to sleep or off and then automatically turns it back on when needed. How far this has come from our early and rather crude versions of this with desktops at Sun.

Think about it: as a company you want to utilize all of the assets you have to perform work that maximizes revenue (or profit). But you also need assets for peak periods that are underutilized during low demand periods. Think New York City taxis. They are busy as heck on a Friday night or during rush hour yet rather idle at 4 AM on a Sunday. You wouldn’t want every one of those cabs with a paid driver idling their engine burning dollars out the tailpipe now would you? So the cabs are parked, the drivers are home asleep, and they work when demand warrants it. So why do we leave our servers (and storage and network ‘taxis’) idling 8,760 hours a day when average peak times are well less than 1,000 hours per year (often less than 100)? We do this and wonder why we have average processor utilizations of less than 10%. (Processor capacity is rarely the limiting factor in most applications these days, but that is a topic for another blog.) And yet those servers consume about 2/3 of peak power when at 0% processor utilization, so why leave them running, burning precious company dollars out through the power meter? Is it charity to our utility companies? I doubt it. So power down those servers when not needed and save precious dollars for more important tasks than burning power unproductively. After all, those servers do have an on/off button. And call the experts at MegaWatt Consulting for these and more solutions to increase your dollars. Power on…productively.