Reducing Consumption

Posted by Flib on January 15th, 2009 filed in Business

I first came across the concept of a 50% goal as part of a green incentive. The aim being to reduce power use by 50%, ideally without changing your workstyle much. This has worked well here and we managed to reduce the office power consumption by just over 50%, saving both money and carbon emissions. Which one is more important depends on your perspective, but with the rising fuel and power costs the first is enough to justify it alone.

The sucess of this got me thinking. How feasible would it be to apply the same concept to other aspects of my business and life? Could you, for example, apply the same concept to office waste, car use or even the amount of processing power user to serve each user on your site. While I haven’t been as sucessful on the first two tasks, there is a definate improvement in both. The third on the otherhand has been very sucessful.

With the improvement in efficiency of the servers, we can either run idle for longer (with the associated power savings) or we can serve well over twice as many users on the same hardware (for the optimised application). This alone can potentially reduce both our CAPEX and OPEX, improving our margins.

[Note: It has been pointed out to me that as an extension of the 80/20 rule (Pareto Analysis) where 80% of the power is used by 20% of the devices, so simply optimising those 20% should mostly get us to that 50% reduction (or 80% if you can get rid of them completely]