There is a focus in much of the coverage of ‘Green IT’ issues on the data center, so much so that it is often seen as the main offender when the reality is that servers are only part of the picture and not the largest part.
Gartner’s figures[1] show that PCs are actually the main consumers of power for IT equipment at 31% of all IT equipment power use worldwide (267 TWh) in 2009. Servers (including cooling costs) come in second at 17% of all IT related power (139 TWh), and this ratio is due to stay roughly the same until at least 2012.
Our own research[2] has shown that 50% of PCs aren’t powered down at the end of the day, and power schemes are either not enforced, or where they are enforced they do not always work (see ‘Why won’t my PC go to sleep?’).
This provides a large opportunity to save energy by powering down PCs overnight and at weekends.In the US alone this amounts to the unnecessary usage of $2.8 billion worth of electricity and emission into the atmosphere of 20 million tons of CO2 annually.
There is less opportunity to save energy in the server environment since most server systems need to be kept running 24/7 to service the few requests which may occur out of hours, but we will be addressing this sector soon with the forthcoming release of our NightWatchman Server product.
Data Centers aren’t the be all and end all of IT power usage, and big savings can be made, usually with much less pain and effort, by also looking at the power management of your PCs.
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