Every piece of equipment in your business presents an opportunity to save power and cut costs. Emerson's Jack Pouchet explains how a few simple ideas and policies can lower your electricity bills -- and help the environment.
Large data centers present big opportunities for large enterprises to cut costs by reducing power use. But small and midsize businesses also can save power and money by implementing a few simple and effective ideas. Jack Pouchet, director of energy initiatives at Emerson Network Power, claims passionately about the fact that, with a little bit of effort, smaller businesses can see real power savings -- that translates into a healthier bottom line, and a healthier planet. Pouchet's approach involves understanding what is consuming your business' power, establishing company-wide policies on conserving power, and upgrading to high-efficiency equipment whenever feasible. Ensuring that businesses dispose of equipment properly is next on his list, right before ensuring that everyone understands that even in sleep mode your machine is still consuming power.
bMighty: How can small and midsize organizations reduce their power consumption if they don't have large data centers?
Jack Pouchet: Small and midsize businesses often don't have data centers, or there is a little data center space but lots of business space. They might have an all-purpose area or a small computer room, but there are things they can do differently. Two thirds of energy consumption power resides outside of the data center and small and midsize businesses can start by buying high-efficiency equipment.
bMighty: How should small and midsize businesses conduct a power audit?
Pouchet: Do your own audit. Monitoring optimization is the first thing I would do as a small and midsize business. It takes time but it's worth doing. Your IT assets are anything with a power connection. If it looks like a piece of computer equipment or networking equipment, it should be included. Small and midsize businesses will probably find that they have computers they don't need that are on and using power. How many servers do you have? How many do you need? You'll start finding that each department -- finance department, production department, manufacturing department, etc. -- has one to five servers. Look at how they're being used. A small and midsize business needs to create a plan because chances are a lot of them aren't necessary. I'm not even talking about going to virtualization, I'm just saying they are not necessary. Just migrate applications over and be done with it.
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bMighty:What other pieces of equipment should be scrutinized during a power audit?
Pouchet: Usually the lowest-hanging fruit are print servers and printers. A lot of power gets used by printers. A study was done by Intel with the state of California on print servers. As many as several hundred print servers were being used and they only needed three. If the state government is doing that, can you imagine small and midsize businesses? There are a lot of redundant assets that aren't needed. A typical small and midsize business doesn't have a corporate policy of print servers, but you should not have personal printers. Company-wide printers are a better idea.
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A 50-person company typically has 10 inkjet printers. Do you need that? Get one nice laser printer and put in a recycling policy for that toner cartridge. Reduce the power bill and get big savings in power and in toner. With inkjet, you might as well replace the printer each time.
Next Page: Better Monitors, Power Supplies, and Servers
