The Fortiva Blog

Wondering how you can afford to go green? Get your numbers straight.

Posted by Justin Wiebe, Fortiva Operations

Given my posting last month on green computing, I found the following statistic based on a new survey by McKinsey and Co. quite interesting.  Apparently, the world’s data centers are projected to surpass the airline industry as a greenhouse gas polluter by 2020.

In my previous post, I wrote about efforts taken by Fortiva to reduce our overall infrastructure power consumption. This has had the dual benefit of reducing both our impact on the environment and our cost of doing business. Since then, I have been thinking more about the challenges of justifying green computing from a dollars and cents perspective.

Until recently, I have rarely been able to create a positive Return On Investment (ROI) for new hardware purchases, especially those related to green computing. It turns out that all along I was missing something – that dollar amount that pushes the cost of existing systems over the top and reduces the payback to less than 3 years (sound familiar?). And what is that key? Power – more importantly, the cost of the power used over its lifetime by the piece of hardware you want to replace. As noted by Mark Monroe, Director of Sustainable Computing at Sun, rarely are power costs included in the IT budget.

Here at Fortiva, we try to roll all of our data center costs into one number. By adding up all co-location costs, power costs, cooling costs and miscellaneous data center costs (but not bandwidth costs) and then dividing this number by the useable power, we obtain the monthly $/VA  cost (or approximately $/W). By then determining the amount of power (VA or W) used by each server, we can calculate the cost per month to keep the server up and running. A sample of the calculation may look something like this:

Co-location Cost ($/VA) * Power Used by Server (VA ) * Server Life = Cost to Run Server

With the cost of power increasing almost everywhere, the Cost To Run Server is approaching the Cost To Buy Server. At Fortiva, the cost of hosting our dual-cpu servers for three years is approximately 75% of the total cost to purchase the server. If you stretch the life of the server out to five years, it actually costs more to host the server than to buy it.

So what should you do now? Try the following:

1 – Determine Co-Location Costs:

• Check your contracts. If you outsource your co-location facilities, you may be able to calculate the $/VA cost from your contracts.
• Talk to your finance department. If you manage your own co-location facilities, see if you can find out the costs of power, maintenance, security, on-call personnel, etc. Remember, your Co-Location Cost is the total of the costs to run the data center, divided by the useable amount of power.

2 – Determine Power Used by Server:

• Get yourself a good power meter and find out how much power your servers actually consume when idle and when under load. The numbers provided by the manufacturers tend not to reflect how you use the servers on a daily basis.

3 – Get out the spreadsheet and start crunching the numbers.

Try calculating the ROI on consolidating some of your existing servers onto virtual machines, or replacing some of your older machines with more energy-efficient models. You’ll probably be surprised by the results.

Hopefully these numbers can provide you with a better understanding of the true cost of your IT infrastructure. Who knows, they may also help you reduce your overall power consumption, justify some new hardware, or even help you justify outsourcing to someone who already has.

Note to Vendors: Please Help Us Be Green

Posted by Justin Wiebe, Fortiva Operations

I recently returned from a trip to Europe where I visited data centers in several countries. Almost everyone talked about the environment, carbon neutral computing and the possibility of governments starting to tax businesses based on their computing carbon footprint. This was a refreshing contrast to my experiences in North America where there is lots of press about ‘Green Computing’, but not too much action.

Here at Fortiva, we have been putting a lot of emphasis on minimizing our footprint. Not just because it is good for the environment, but also because the economics make sense. Over the past few years, we have managed to reduce our power consumption in a number of different ways:

• Using AMD processors and lower-power SATA drives has allowed us to reduce our power usage per GB stored from 0.2 W to 0.05 W
• Virtualization in our Development and QA environments has reduced the number of servers by approximately one-fifth. 
• Investing in remote management solutions reduces the number of visits we make to our data centers.
• And, as I opened with, we are looking into our vendor’s  ’greenness ‘.

Looking at this list of changes, it seems like we have made a lot of progress over the past few years. Unfortunately, it still feels like we have a long way to go. I have come up with a wish list of changes I would like to see our vendors make to help us achieve our goals:

• Ship less junk with each server:  For every server we receive, we probably throw away a third of the total weight shipped. Packaging, cable management kits, mounting brackets for non-standard racks, and documentation that no one reads goes directly into the dumpster. Some of our more enlightened data centers encourage recycling, but no one seems to take the time to sort the mess. Add the extra fuel used to ship the servers as a result of this excess weight, and eliminating these extras would save us all money.
• Act like a global company: One of our server suppliers recently announced that they will no longer ship a server purchased in Canada directly to a US address. What this means for us is that when we order a server for one of our US data centers, the manufacturer ships it from the US factory to our Canadian office, where we turn around and ship it back.
• Offer us older hardware:  Newer isn’t always greener – or even necessary. In many cases, we can use older, lower power consuming CPUs to power our storage servers. We just can’t get them.

I am sure there a lots of things I have left off this list that may make more sense for your company. Think about them, and the next time your vendor’s rep asks if there is any way they can help you, you’ll have something to share with them.