I think my government is trying to tell me something …

The wife hit the roof this morning. Literally. From July 1 the price I pay for electricity increased by 20% … ouch. This is a significant increase in the running cost of a home and a business. It’s a wake-up call for me to get serious about looking at exactly what uses electricity in both my home and office … and to look at what I can do to reduce the amount of electricity I use.

There are several basic electricity uses in the office that I can work around … reducing the number of lights that are on in areas not heavily used … putting on a jacket instead of pumping the air-conditioning flat out in the cold weather (yes, it’s cold where I live), but the biggest electricity use in the whole office is my lab.

It’s really convenient to have all my servers and NAS devices humming away so that I can access whatever I want, or test whatever I need, without waiting. It’s also necessary for some of my machines to be running all the time whether I like it or not.

So on those machines I turn on power saving on the hard drives. That’s a pretty simple process but let’s look at exactly what it does for me. Now if you want financial number crunching then go to our website … there’s a fancy calculator on there (www.adaptec.com/greenpower) that will let you come up with all sorts of numbers.

However, in simplistic terms, this is the scenario in my home office/lab. I work a ridiculous number of hours (that one is for if the boss reads this blog), but I don’t access my servers all the time. I sleep occasionally (when I don’t access my servers at all) and I do not, repeat do not, work weekends (except when travelling). Now I’ve done a few calculations that are a little scary, but eye-opening:

Hours in a week - 24×7=168
Hours worked per day - 15
Days worked per week - 5
Hours worked per week (maximum) - 75
Percentage of time that I could possibly, remotely, conceivably access my servers - 44.64%

Simply put … that’s 55.36% of the week that I don’t access my servers. Now consider the fact that the hard drives in my servers are all spinning all the time and you start to ask some serious questions … like “why?”

Since, for some reason known only to me, I use Adaptec controllers in my servers, I have enabled power saving on all my raid arrays. This means that the server is still running, and I can access it whenever I want, but the hard drives are not spinning unless I either need to write data to them or read something from them. So in theory I’m now saving 50% of my electricity costs. That’s probably not realistic in several ways. Firstly the rest of the server is still running (power supply, processor and fans etc so that will reduce the savings somewhat. On the other hand, servers like my backup server which only run for less than 1 hour a day gain massive power savings from having the hard drives asleep for a large portion of the day.

I’ll do the maths over the coming months, and watch the electricity bill (as will the wife I’m sure), but it makes sense for even a small operation like mine to save runing costs. Imagine what it can do for a larger organisation!

Ciao
Neil