Reduce Energy Consumption

There are many reasons to upgrade your computer hardware.  Unfortunately, energy consumption is often overlooked.  TAP Tech can help reduce energy consumption at your business by analyzing current usage and recommending replacement hardware, or power schemes to greatly reduce your electric bill.  Some devices are best left on 24 hours a day, and those are the ones we typically target.  Other devices such as workstations and printers can be tuned to use very little electricity outside of business hours.  Network devices can be replaced for faster speed as well as to reduce energy consumption.

Let’s take a look at a TAP Tech project that reduced energy consumption and increased performance.

A client of ours had an aging Server and Network infrastructure that, in addition to being slow and less than reliable, was gobbling up electricity around the clock.  Here’s the quick rundown of their old server rack:

1. Server stack:
   1. Dell PowerEdge 2950 File Server
   2. Dell PowerEdge R710 Exchange Server
   3. Dell PowerEdge 2900 Terminal Server
   4. Dell PowerEdge 2950 AD Server
   5. Dell PowerEdge 2950 II Tower File Server
   6. Dell EMC RAID enclosure for Tower Server
2. Two APC UPS units for battery backup and power filtering
3. Two 24 port 100x ethernet switches
4. One Tape Drive backup

A simple current test revealed that this setup was drawing just over 1800 Watts, running 24/7!  With our clients electricity prices, that resulted in about $270 per month of electricity!

The server rack was kept in an air conditioned space, and with all that heat pumping out, the costs of the air conditioners likely rivaled that of the computer and network equipment.

So what’s the fix here?  How does TAP Tech reduce energy costs?

First and foremost, this server infrastructure was aging and less than reliable.  Network access needed a speed bump as well.  We recommended consolidation through the use of virtual machines and a new piece of hardware to host them.  Here’s the new hardware stack:

1. Lenovo TD350 Tower server setup as a Hyper-V host
2. Replaced 100x switches with new energy efficient gigabit 48 port switch
3. Replaced aging APC UPS units with a single, more efficient unit
4. Upgraded to external HDD image based Hybrid on/offsite backup

This setup greatly reduced energy consumption… we measured the new hardware stack to consume only 130 Watts.  In addition to the speed and reliability, that saves the client over $240 per month.

We were also able to implement a group policy for workstations to allow them to enter low-power mode when not being used.

We suggest you use this electricity cost calculator provided by energy.gov to get a feel for your electricity usage, or Contact TAP Tech for an energy audit!