...every day a little pondering, backstage information, jokes, tips and tricks.
6
Little Pondering
Cost Reduction II: Issue of Under-Utilized Servers
"Understanding a problem is knowing why it is
hard to solve it, and why the most straight forward
approaches won't work."
— Karl Popper
In our little pondering behind
Door 5 we discovered
that the potential reduction of the number of servers can provide an
important cost saving. Many people at this point easily throw in the
argument that this is not true in practice as from server hardware,
power consumption, cooling and rack space rent the server hardware is
the obviously most expensive and even after a server consolidation one
usually still has the hardware flying around and hence no costs are
effectively saved.
Power-Off To The Rescue
That's not true as you already can easily safe lots of costs
by just powering off the no longer necessary hardware.
You don't believe it? Well, let's do a short "back of the
envelope" calculation: The costs for "business electricity" (at
least in Germany) is at about 0.13 EUR/KWh (net), a typical
datacenter server like a Sun Fire V210 or V240 consumes
according to
Sun's power calculator about 350W system power.
This means just the box' power consumption already costs you 414
EUR/year. Compared to the buying price of about EUR 3000 and the
typical (German) tax amortization time of 3 years, this means the
yearly power consumption is already at 50% of the hardware cost
(proportionate for the year as business customers have to calculate
it).
Leverage From OpenPKG
And if you also calculate the cost for cooling and rack space rent you
would be even more surprised how expensive even a datacenter hosted
server really is. Hence, so much you use OpenPKG's "multiple-instance"
feature to consolidate servers the better will be your total cost
savings.
