IT Power Consumption and Costs

I'm starting a new project that I've been wanting to pursue for a few years ... an overall IT power consumption and cost analysis.  Yes, I'm a sick puppy.  Why start it now?  Well, the main reason is we're heading into budget cuts and I'm wondering what kind of cost savings we'd see by powering down PC's overnight.  Yes, this causes patch management headaches, but perhaps the pain is worth the gain?  I can't truly say either way without supporting data.

Of course the end user PC's are just one part of the power consumption equation.  I want to measure everything ... switches, servers, APs, SANs, etc ... if it belongs to IT I want to measure it and in the end have a pretty comprehensive report on what it costs to power IT at GCC.  A side benefit from this will be having some data to estimate how much we've saved by virtualizing servers and storage in the past 2 years.  Bonus!

I did a little googling tonight and this Kill-A-Watt monitor looks like a cost effective tool to get most of the data I'll need.  About the only devices at GCC they won't work on are our UPS units as the Kill-A-Watt maxes out at 15A.

I did a similar study 6-7 years ago at my prior employer with the school's PC's.  I don't recall the $ amounts, but in the end we did shut down the computers during the weekends.  Anyone else done an IT Power analysis for your organization?  What did you discover?

Comments

[Dwayne Sudduth]

Jason;

I've done similar studies (before SAN and energy star days) and we ended up shutting down PC's at the end of the day. Currently, my PC, LCD monitors, my kids PC and the laptop in the house end up only costing about $3.50/month in electricity..the cost savings are negligible enough when you count the XP and Antivirus updates that have to run before anyone can start working.

I'm not sure how much of a difference you'll see with the advanced power management that exists today--does it warrant having to push patches manually and reboot your machines during the day?

[Chris Kehayias]

Totally funny. We are in the middle of the exact same project. The kill-a-watt works really well for 120V stuff. We have been talking about powering down all days except on Wednesday Nights. That works well for us since we have a service that night.

Once we get our report finalized, I'll post our results in my blog also!

[Jeremy Good]

I was working on the same thing last week! I was amazed when I crunched the numbers how much money we spend to power our infrastructure. I figured that by cutting 1 Amp of constant draw, we could save at least $700 a year! I hope to pick up a “Kill-a-watt” this week as well.

[Matthew Irvine]

I got the Kill-A-Watt, and I like it. I haven't gone all out like you, but it really helps me to see when there's dirty power. I hate that dirty power. We're moving mostly to thin clients to reduce our overall IT electric usage.

[Jeremy Good]

If you have Dell gear, there are two tools you will want to check out. A server tool http://www.dell.com/html/us/products/rack_advisor_new/index.html?~lt=popup and a desktop/notebook tool http://www.dell.com/html/us/products/optiplex/calculator/index.html . Both help you play out scenarios.

[John De Souza]

I just picked up a kill-a-watt at cyberguys.com to help my son with energy school projects. Did not take him long to find the 15A limit!

[Derek Schwab]

I just took a quick look at our server room UPS (we have a 15KVA UPS that powers the entire room). The web interface reports that we are drawing 5820 watts. That translates into 4190kw/h per month. At $0.09 per kw/h (I think that's about what we pay), that's $377 per month or $4525 per year. Wow. And that's JUST the server room. If I were to calculate with 200+ workstations and all the switches and network gear scattered around, I'm sure the number is staggering.