Saving energy

Energy usage is a problem for all of us. All aspects of energy usage impact upon the environment from extraction of the material to provide the energy to when the energy is used and emissions and waste heat are created.

Everyone is aware of how energy costs are spiralling and for this reason alone many organisations are now looking for ways of saving energy in all parts of their operations. This also has the beneficial effect of reducing their impact upon the environment.

Through the use of technologies such as virtualisation and terminal services it is possible to reduce the number of servers your organisation has and use the hardware far more efficiently, thus saving energy. Much of the time a normal server is doing little work but still consuming electricity to do this. Using virtualisation enables several physical servers to be converted to virtual servers all running on one physical server. It is possible to achieve a ratio of up to ten virtual servers per physical server, VMware specify energy savings of up to 80% are then possible. Don’t forget, such an infrastructure also adds other benefits such as resilience, easier disaster recovery and flexibility for the future.

Wanstor use state-of-the-art colocation facilities which have efficient cooling of the servers, but by reducing the number of servers required through virtualisation we also reduce the amount of cooling required and therefore the amount of energy used wherever the servers are located. Many organisations now find that the energy used in cooling their server rooms exceeds the energy required to power the equipment in the room.

Wanstor utilises technologies and facilities which can help you with saving energy:-

• Virtualisation – Less servers consuming power, lower cooling requirements
• Terminal Services – Thin clients and low powered PCs at the client end consuming much less power than the average PC which spends most of its time idle but uses a relatively large amount of energy to do this. Old PCs get a new lease of life and can be replaced less frequently.
• Colocation – State of the art facilities with highly efficient cooling systems with costs related to power usage and therefore giving an incentive to use power efficient systems.
• Energy Efficient Hardware – Our hardware suppliers (for example HP) design energy efficiency into their systems and should you need to purchase new hardware from Wanstor you can be assured that it will use the latest technology to keep down your energy costs.

We can help you utilise these technologies – call us on 020 7592 7860 – and try our energy savings calculator.