09 Oct 2012 / by Chris / in Blog

Power down your servers

Have you ever wondered how much it’s costing you to leave your server on 24 hours a day, 7 days a week?

Once you’ve measured the power draw in watts (or guesstimated the power draw), you’ll need to convert that to kilowatt-hours. Here’s the kilowatt-hour calculation for my server, which draws ~200 watts:

200 watts * (8,760 hours per year) / 1000 = 1752 kilowatt-hours

The other thing you’ll need to know is how much you’re paying for power in your area. Power here in Congleton is a grand total of 12.495p per Kilowatt-hour.

1752 kilowatt-hours * 12.495 cents / 100 = £218.91

So leaving my server on is costing me £218 / year, or £18.24 per month.

So what can we do about it?

[rb_list type=”arrow”][rb_list_item]Configure the monitor to sleep on inactivity. This one’s kind of a no-brainer, but worth mentioning. A CRT eats about 80 watts, and a LCD of equivalent size less than half that.[/rb_list_item][rb_list_item][/rb_list_item][rb_list_item]Disconnect peripherals you don’t use. Have a server with a CD-ROM you rarely use? Disconnect the power to it. A sound card you don’t use? Pull it out. Redundant fans? Disconnect them. That’s only a savings of a few watts, but it all adds up.[/rb_list_item][rb_list_item][/rb_list_item][rb_list_item]Move to the cloud. For £18.24 per month you could have six cloud based email accounts, professionally managed, anti-virus and anti-spam protection. And you would even have some change.[/rb_list_item][/rb_list]