How have you saved green by going green? [closed]

This is a pretty huge question. There are alot of different ways people are saving energy and then in turn saving $$ by greening their datacenters.

I think you are asking about the ROI on such efforts.

Virtualization is certainly a great example - purchase some big physical servers (2 or 4 sockets) with a ton of memory (32 - 128 GB) and then convert Physical Servers to Virtual Server (P2V) and turn off the physical servers.

VMware has an ROI caculator

http://vmware.com/go/calculator

But it really depends - if you put in 3 VMware ESX Hosts that can handle 40 Server Workloads and you only migrate 10 or 20 - then you won't see the ROI.

But if you counted the 40 power supplies (2 per server or 900 Watts per box) and then realize you are replacing them with 3 ESX hosts (2 per server or 1200 watts per box) then you end up yanking out 36,000 Watts (40 x 900) and replacing it with 3600 watts of power (nearly 10:1 consolidation from a Watts perspective). A net savings of around 32,000 Watts.

And realize - its approximately 1 Ton of Cooling per every 3.5 kW of power - so if you take out 32,000 Watts then you can save approximately 30 tons of cooling (so you figure the cost of power to 30 tons of cooling) and that's a savings you can measure.

My math be off - I been playing outside all day (sun exposure).

Other big areas to improve in - Distributed Power Management - turn off or condense workloads at night, spin down disks in a SAN if not needed, etc.

Replace batteries in UPS systems with Flywheels (http://www.pentadyne.com/).

Use ambient cooling if possible, when possible.

Put your Datacenters somewhere with a cheaper cost per kW/hour.

Use Deep Lake Water Cooling (shout out to Toronto peeps).

As everyone has commented on VMware, I'll talk about something different.

Another way we reduce energy consumption is to not run old hardware. The servers we bought over 5 years ago consume more than twice the power, and output nearly twice the heat of low energy servers today.

Tips:

Look for the BTU ratings of servers before you buy, try and use efficient power supplies and low thermal-power CPU's.

Decommission servers fully once they are no longer needed (i.e: remove them from the data center entirely)

/ Richy