It was very important to us that we use the technology in-house that we intended to sell to our customer base. Ethically we believe in thoroughly testing everything we sell to make sure we know the products inside out.

We already keep a log of the downtime so we had a good starting point for the first and third objectives and we invested in some equipment and software to allow us to monitor our power consumption for the entire office building and to monitor separate sections of the building as power cost centres; the main focus being the power consumption of our data centre.

We installed the monitoring hardware well in advance of starting the project to ensure we had sufficient base line data to measure the objectives.

After initial analysis of our server hardware and the services running on them we decided on a list of changes and prioritised them in the order of potential impact on the reduction of power consumption and carbon footprint.

These changes were;

1. Implement server virtualization and shared high availability storage to consolidate server resources and reduce the amount of hardware we needed to run our systems
   
2. Move as many management applications as possible to cloud computing services without impacting the availability of the system
   
3. Retro-fit older hardware with solid state hard-drives to increase data access speeds and reduce the mean time to failure and required cooling 

Method

Server Virtualization
Before implementing virtualization we implemented a data rationalization project to archive old data files and reduce the amount required storage space. This would also make the implementation easier as there is less data to move. With any implementation project moving data is time consuming and also susceptible to problems so the more we archives the simpler the implementation.

We used Microsoft Server 2008 as our virtual server host environment with a QNAP shared storage device providing adequate storage for our needs and flexible expansion should we need it.

We never expected to see any power gains with this initially, in fact, just the opposite as this was additional hardware designed to replace older hardware over the implementation of the project.

Cloud Computing
We analysed the software services we used to run the business, their priority of service and their availability to operate in the cloud computing arena. With this information we then formulated a migration plan. Migrating to cloud computing would be a project that extended beyond the scope of this project as the more critical services would be dependent on faster, reliable internet connectivity and the ability of some providers to provide cloud based software as a service (SaaS).

For some time we trialled Microsoft Office 365 as we are a Microsoft Online Services Partner and although it provided a flexible approach and elements of what we needed for cloud services we ultimately decided to use Google Apps for Business.

Our reason for selecting Google and becoming a Google reseller was based on the ease of setup of the Google apps cloud services and Google’s commitment to develop low carbon, sustainable data centres, a commodity that we valued and believed will become an important trading point in the future.

Solid State Hard Drives
Solid state hard drives have progressed to a level where they are now an affordable solution for small businesses. We decided to retrofit our old servers with solid state hard drives as initial pre-project test indicated a high saving in power consumption. In addition, there were benefits with longevity of the devices. 

• There are no moving parts so in theory the mean time to failure was increased
  
• There was less noise pollution
  
• They drastically reduced the need for cooling our data centre 

Results

Server Virtualization
We measured the daily consumption of our datacentre in Kw Hours per day. Our starting point before any modifications was 28.7 KwHrs/day for six servers, data switches, routers and our telephone system.

The table below shows the reduction in power consumption over the implementation of key hardware.

It’s hard to associate an exact figure to the contribution of power reduction from the server virtualization alone as it’s benefits were combined with the cloud computing services to consolidate and remove older hardware. On analysing the data we estimate the savings from the virtualization platform to be 3 KwHrs/day

Cloud Computing
We migrated to Google’s Gmail and through minimal setup we could instantly access email on our Smartphones, workstations and mobile devices. Nothing new to be fair but there’s something to be said from the simplistic nature of Google’s operation.

For document creation and storage Google Apps provides an online editing tool which is adequate for editing documents through mobile working but not our preferred method for general document creation. For this, we retained our local installations of Microsoft Office 2010 with an added app that allowed us to automatically synch documents with our Google docs.

We altered the way we use document storage by storing the top ten most used documents for each user on Google Docs. This allowed us to quickly collaborate and share documents between team members without the constraints of VPN access back to our head office.

An unforeseen side effect of this was our productivity and collaboration increased instantly and we saw a sharp rise in our ability to produce accurate and informative proposals and strategic documents.

The rest of our documents were archived onto our internal server storage.

This operation allowed us to remove two entire servers from the data centre with a further reduction in power consumption of approximately 3 KwHrs/day.

Solid State Hard Drives
Retro fitting the solid state drives was set to be a bit tricky as all indications pointed to third party drives not being compatible with HP servers. The problem seemed to lie with inaccurate identification of temperature reporting which would cause the server fans to remain constantly on, removing any benefit in power reduction and increasing noise pollution to an unacceptable level.

Initially we tested this on one of the old servers, previously removed and managed to overcome the issue. We then decided to replace one other, older server with a new, more power efficient server with the solid state drives.

For the purposes of illustration we also compared the same server with both traditional and solid state drives. The results below show a significant decrease in power of almost 40 Watts on normal running plus a much faster boot time.




Conclusion

Availability
During the twelve months from October 2010 to September 2011 we recorded a total of 4 hours downtime giving an annual availability of 99.96%. Not quite our objective yet but certainly a massive improvement on the previous year of 99.82%

Power and carbon
Overall we saw a power reduction of 9.5 KwHrs/day which, according to the carbon trust and DEFRA equates to approximately 4.98 tonnes of CO2e

9.5 KwHrs/day equates to a 33% reduction in our overall data centre power, 3% above our objective.

General
There are a couple of ‘spin offs’ from this project that will help us achieve a larger strategic goal of becoming a carbon neutral organisation;

• We are in the process of moving our energy supplier to Good Energy who provide 100% renewable power

• We are in the process of having a solar PV system installed
  
• We have invested in professional qualifications for our staff in carbon literacy and low carbon IT systems 

With Thanks
Many thanks to Andy McKenzie from Low Carbon Futures for his role in helping with this project and special thanks to the team at Partner2Succeed and their resource efficiency collaboration club for the introduction and allowing us a platform to share our ideas and objectives.