6 good tips for saving electricity in the server room
A server room in the average Danish workplace uses EUR 13,500 – 27,000 worth of power per year. 60% goes on servers, 30% on cooling and layout, and 10% on fixtures and fittings in the server room. You can save between 1/3 and 1/2 the energy costs without compromising security.
- Locate the server room in a low temperature environment
Locate the server room in an unheated room with high thermal loss to the surrounding area. This saves on cooling.
- Choose IT equipment with low energy consumption
Power supplies to servers, disk drives and other devices are often only 50% efficient. This is expensive in electricity terms. At the same time a large amount of unnecessary heat is produced which requires cooling. It’s therefore a good idea to choose energy efficient servers, disk drives and power supplies.
- Reduce the number of servers and disk drives
Consolidate several virtual servers onto one physical server in a so-called server consolidation. This way you end up with fewer servers and thus reduce the amount of electricity you use to run applications.
You can also cut down on the number of disk drives by aggregating the disk capacity in a so-called Storage Area Network (SAN). In most cases you can reduce your power consumption to servers and disks by 20-35%.
- Switch off equipment when not in use
Switch off all superfluous IT equipment such as telephone systems, and turn off the lights when you leave the room. By doing this you reduce the amount of heat that has to be cooled.
- Use heat from the server room to heat other areas
The temperature of the warm air extracted from the server room is 30-35%. This can be ducted into the building’s heating system and can be used to pre-heat the fresh air circulated to other areas of the building.
- Factor electricity consumption into purchasing policies
Electricity consumption accounts for a significant proportion of the expenses of running a server room. You should therefore factor electricity consumption into purchasing policies for IT equipment and cooling systems.
Page last updated 06.10.2008