IT Optimisation - Sustainability & Green IT

The growing power consumption by data centres and the need to cool constantly running equipment and servers results in increasingly high energy costs. Using less power helps cut the cooling bill. Using smaller, more efficient servers reduces the need for expensive rack space. Now, what's good for the environment is imperative for business. Q Associates delivers "eco-friendly" servers and microchips that help reduce power consumption and related costs.

Sustainable Computing starts at the product design stage - producing IT solutions that use less of the world's resources during manufacture, consume less electricity during their operation, generate less heat and are easier to reuse or recycle.

Developing new products in accordance with Sustainable Computing principles means designing systems architectures and individual IT products that are less expensive to run and have a longer working life. This offers financial savings for IT customers and results in less environmental damage for the planet.

Sustainable Computing also requires IT manufacturers to ensure that as many individual components as possible have an extended life beyond their initial deployment. Finally, when a system reaches the end of its working life, it should be relatively easy to disassemble components for reuse or recycling.

Measure your own server efficiency

SWaP - Space, Watts and Performance. This is the new standard for calculating server efficiency. Calculate the impact of a server in your data centre before you buy.

Introduction to SWaP

Evaluating a new server for your data centre is no longer simply a matter of measuring raw performance. With today's increasing demands, you also need to consider how much power, air conditioning and space a server consumes. While traditional metrics are good for calculating throughput, they don't consider these new power and space demands in the equation. What's driving this new challenge? We call it the Participation Age. Buyers and sellers want to participate in new ways. They want to be connected and access more services and information in many different ways. With the explosion of wireless devices, voice and data convergence and the increasing use of web applications, data centres are under pressure to deliver more services, transactions and data to more devices. And it's just the beginning. Demand for these new services is growing exponentially.

How SWaP Works

SWaP - Space, Watts and Performance - is the new standard for calculating server efficiency.

In the example above, Server A and Server B produce equal performance, however Server A is half the size and less than half the power of Server B. Using the SWaP formula, it is revealed that Server A is over 5X more efficient than Server B--providing a huge impact to rack dense deployments in your data centre.

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