CHAPTER

3
Minimizing Power Usage

A
sk any parent of teenagers and they will tell you that their kids think electricity
flows from the wall for free. But it’s not free, and mom and dad know it. Cellular
telephones, computers, iPods, and whatever else the kids plug in add up in
electricity costs. It’s costly enough at home, but the issue is even more pronounced in an
organization.
Sure, a couple computers here and there take their toll, but what if you’ve got hundreds
of computers, or even thousands? And don’t forget the servers and networking gear used to
support those workstations (and the necessity to cool those servers, see Chapter 4). To make
matters worse, industrywide, costs are going up.
According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA’s) 2006 datacenter
energy efficiency report, in 2006, the total amount of power used by datacenters represented
approximately 1.5 percent of total U.S. electricity consumption. The cost totaled US$4.5
billion, about as much as was spent by 5.8 million average households for the year—US
EPA, July 2007.

NOTE According to a 2007 study by Gartner Group, information and communications technology
accounts for 2 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions, which is roughly the equivalent of what
the airline industry produces.

The fact of the matter is that your computers use juice, and that juice costs you money.
To save a lot of money—and to help the environment in the process—you need to reduce
how much electricity you use. And to reduce how much electricity you use, you need to
know how much you’re using and where it can be trimmed.
This chapter looks at the issue of power consumption and offers some recommendations
to reduce it across your IT department’s infrastructure, from servers to workstations.

Power Problems
Power is a huge issue for businesses. Forget for a moment that this book is largely about
minimizing your IT department’s impact on the environment, and look at it from a cost
point of view. For no other reason than saving a lot of money, energy efficiency is important.
But even beyond saving the planet and saving money, you need to save power, because
at some point, you may not have enough power to run your equipment.

45
Copyright © 2008 by The McGraw-Hill Companies. Click here for terms of use.
46 Part II: Consumption Issues

Energy-Saving Action Savings (kW) Savings (%)

Lower-power processors 111 10
High-efficiency power supplies 141 12
Power management features 125 11
Blade servers 8 1
Server virtualizations 156 14
Cooling best practices 24 2
Variable-speed fan drives 79 7
Supplemental cooling 200 18

TABLE 3-1 The Various Ways You Can Cut Power and Costs

Power isn’t cheap. As if rising prices aren’t enough, datacenters use a lot of juice. U.S.
datacenter power consumption totaled 45 billion kilowatt (kW) hours in 2005. That’s more
than Mississippi and 19 other states. The entire world used 123 billion kW hours in 2005.
U.S. businesses spent between 4 and 10 percent of their IT budgets on energy. Gartner
predicts that this will rise fourfold in the next 5 years.
It gets even more alarming. Power supply vendor Liebert Corp. announced that 33 percent
of respondents to a datacenter survey expected to be out of power and cooling capacity by the
end of 2007. That number jumped to 96 percent by 2011—Lisbert, 2006.
According to a study by Gartner, 50 percent of datacenters said they will have insufficient
power and cooling capacity by 2008—Gartner, November 2006.
So what’s the upshot of all this? It’s a business imperative to reduce power use wherever
you can. It’s not just for the planet. It’s not just to save some money. It’s for the sake of
your business.
There are sundry changes you can make in your organization to save power. Some
changes are big (such as installing new servers) whereas others are small (such as changing
the desktop color of your monitors).
Table 3-1 shows how making corrections throughout your organization can help you
save money.
Another way to look at the figures in Table 3-1 is like this: A US$10 billion company
spends about 4 percent of its revenue on IT costs. So if we take a couple figures from Table 3-1
(variable-speed fan drives, for instance, at 7 percent), then the company stands to save
US$2.8 million a year. That’s because 10 billion × 0.07 × 0.04 = 2.8 million.
For your own organization, you can compute savings by plugging in how much your IT
department spends and then doing a rough estimate with the numbers in Table 3-1.

Monitoring Power Usage

Obviously, the server room isn’t the only place where power gets used. Your whole organization
uses power, all the time. The place to start is with an overall assessment of the power you use.
As you are an IT professional, you’re likely only interested in the computers and network
infrastructure, but you can take this task to whatever level of granularity you choose.
 Chapter 3: Mi ni mi zi n g Pow er Us age 47

For instance, although reducing server power draws and minimizing PC power usage
seem obvious, you might decide to implement a plan where lighting automatically turns
off. You could get as small as directing laptop and cellular phone users to disconnect their
chargers from the wall when they’re not using them. Although there’s no device plugged
into the charger, the charger still sips at the electrical current.
Let’s talk about how your organization can study its power usage.
You should consider the costs involved with doing the testing yourself and what it
would cost to contract out the project. There’s no shame in hiring a professional to do the
heavy lifting. They are trained and experienced in this type of work and can give you the
results you want more quickly than you are likely able to do on your own—although you
can certainly do it on your own.

PART II
Servers
To monitor power consumption yourself, you need to use power-monitoring software.
Without knowledge of where you’re starting, it’s impossible to tell how much of a problem
you have and to what degree your fixes are helping.
Several vendors offer tools that help monitor datacenter power. For instance, IBM’s
PowerExecutive provides the tools needed to monitor and manage power consumption
accurately. It can measure real-time power consumption and heat emission by individual server,
server group, or location. It allows for the optimization of energy use and the lowering of power
consumption when low utilization can provide cost savings. These power monitoring and
management capabilities are an important tool in achieving energy efficiency in the datacenter.
IBM’s PowerExecutive tool is shown in Figure 3-1.
With the results you get from your study, you should be able to do the following:

• Understand the datacenter’s thermal traits.

• Locate overlapping areas of cooling capacity. This helps because it shows where you can
place high-density or mission-critical equipment because of its ideal cooling location.
• Consider “what-ifs” with the placement of the datacenter

NOTE Don’t just stop with the servers. Don’t forget to upgrade transformers, uninterruptible
power supplies, and fans, among other devices.

Low-Cost Options
There are also some very low-cost solutions for checking power on your workstations and
standalone devices.

Kill A Watt
The Kill A Watt device is a US$25 product that you plug into the wall and then plug your
computer or monitor into the device. The result is that it will show you how much power
your device is using.
True, it’s not really practical in an environment with hundreds of workstations to run
around and plug in this device. However, assuming all the devices’ settings are the same
(or similar), you can measure a couple workstations and make some easy (and inexpensive)
assumptions about power usage.
More information about the Kill A Watt can be found at Link 3-1.
48 Part II: Consumption Issues

FIGURE 3-1 IBM offers its PowerExecutive tool to help you monitor power use in your datacenter.

Calculator
Tech Republic offers a free worksheet to help you determine various costs for monitor
power. It allows you to do the following:

• Determine how much you spend on electricity to power your existing monitors.
• Compare new LCD and CRT monitors to determine which option is less expensive.
• Compare different models of the same type of monitor to determine which one
carries the lowest total cost, when power is considered.
• Compare the same monitor under two different operating scenarios. For example,
see how much cost savings you could achieve by implementing a monitor’s sleep
mode instead of leaving it running at full power when not in use.

The worksheet can be found at Link 3-2. The download does require a free membership
on their website.
 Chapter 3: Mi ni mi zi n g Pow er Us age 49

Reducing Power Use

Once you have an idea of how much power you’re using, it’s time to take steps. There are a
number of ways you can cut your electric bill. In this section, we’ll take a closer look at
some ideas that can help cut power use.

Data De-Duplication
The mantra of computer use has been (and likely will continue to be) “Back up your data.”
And that’s good advice. It’s like “Wear your seatbelt” and “Never play pool against a guy
named after a city.” It just makes sense.
But are we overdoing it? Although it’s never a good idea to hit the freeway without a

PART II
seatbelt or to play nine-ball with a guy named Cleveland, we tend to back up stuff over and
over. Once is often enough. More than that is just wasteful and costly.
So-called “data de-duplication” is a tool for reducing storage and bandwidth consumed
from disk-based backup. By eliminating the need to constantly back up the same file over
and over again, backup storage consumption is reduced 10 to 50 times. Because less data is
sent across your network, overall bandwidth consumption is reduced by almost 500 times.
The obvious benefit is freeing up storage space, but there are energy implications that
affect your corporate ledger. Reducing the number of data copies reduces storage capacity
needs and storage power consumption. Further, once data storage has been reduced,
snapshots and other copies from high-performance disks can be shifted to lower-performance,
energy-efficient disks.
The benefit trickles down when you consider your organization’s remote sites. Because
less data is being replicated, money is saved because network traffic and storage capacity
are not being overused.

Virtualization
The biggest power draw to your IT infrastructure is from your servers. In and of themselves,
they can gobble up 50 percent of the power coming into your datacenter. The best way to
reduce this power usage is to reduce the number of servers you use.
“Madness!” you proclaim. “We have that many servers because we need that many
servers.”
Although you may have, in the past, needed that many servers to fulfill mission-critical
tasks, by consolidating several machines into one and through virtualization, you can wheel
out some of those watt-munching behemoths. This is illustrated in Figure 3-2.

NOTE We’ll talk about server virtualization and how to get your hands dirty doing it in Chapter 13,
when we discuss configuring the server and using applications such as Virtual PC and Microsoft
Virtual Server.

Data storage is another massive consumer of power. Direct-attached storage can account
for as much as 27 percent of your electricity bill. Direct-attached storage units fragment
where data is stored in the organization. Also, each device must consume its own power.
Clustering also involves identical hardware and operating systems to ensure a smooth
rollover in the event of tragedy. The costs add up, especially when one considers the cost of
the hardware and the power draw—especially from a largely unused device.
50 Part II: Consumption Issues

FIGURE 3-2
Consolidating
servers onto a
fewer number of
units conserves
energy.

Old servers virtualized

on a single server
Old servers

If you virtualize your servers, however, advanced clustering technologies allow them to
act as traffic cops and move applications between servers and storage devices with
precision. Regardless of what fails, you can still keep working as normal. Further, this
causes a reduction in the need for hardware, space, and energy usage.

Storage
If your organization uses a lot of direct-attached storage, you will see a huge power savings
if you switch over to a storage area network (SAN). By removing file servers, you see an
instant reduction in power usage.
A SAN also allows you to grow in a logical, efficient manner. With direct-attached
storage, you have to add file servers to your network. If you’ve got a SAN, you just have
to add disks, which is considerably less expensive.

Case Studies
Vanderbilt University’s IT services organization has turned to virtualization with great success.
Realizing that physical servers cost money for power and cooling, as well as their
environmental effects, the university decided to host fewer servers and virtualize. IT services
officials utilized server virtualization for 35 percent of the servers they manage. They estimate
they have been saving 20,575 watts per hour. Officials hope to eventually virtualize 80 percent
of their servers. The state of Oregon is taking on a much larger consolidation project. It is
combining 11 state agency datacenters by June 2009. The plan is for the centers to be
combined at a new datacenter in Salem and involves virtualizing both storage and servers.
The project is estimated to cost $43 million and it is expected to save $10 to $12 million
per year, once finished, and reduce power consumption by up to 35 percent.

Management
In most organizations, computers are used for just 4 hours a day. The additional 20 hours,
those idle machines are still using energy.
Some estimates say that 65 percent of the energy used by computers and monitors is
wasted because workers don’t turn off computers when they leave for the day. Additionally,
half of computer monitors do not have a power management scheme applied, so more
money is wasted when they fail to automatically switch off.
 Chapter 3: Mi ni mi zi n g Pow er Us age 51

A number of utilities are available that enable system administrators to easily manage
power settings. These utilities usually enable sleep features built into prevalent operating
systems and allow a computer to go into low-power-consuming sleep mode.

NOTE Even if you don’t want to spend money on an application or don’t trust the freeware out
there, Policy Manager on Windows lets you establish power settings for your users.

It’s estimated that these toolkits can save between $10 and $50 per computer per year.

Bigger Drives

PART II
Another technological boon that can help you conserve power is to ditch all your older,
smaller hard drives and install a new, bigger one.
Serial ATA (SATA) drives use about 50 percent less power per terabyte (TB) than Fibre
Channel drives. They are also higher in storage density, which also helps reduce power
consumption.
For instance, if you replace 11 legacy drives with a modern, high-capacity drive, you get
a 16 percent increase on capacity and use 81 percent less power. Further, you save 93 percent
more floor space than with the other system.

Involving Your Utility Company

You should also try to involve your utility company in your efforts to reduce power costs.
They can offer power-savings tips as well as other services that can save you money.

Monitoring
One way you can monitor how much power you use is simply by contacting your utility
company. They can provide you with historical information about how much power was
consumed (there is likely a difference since October when you added 25 percent more
servers), and they can help you figure out what you’re currently using.

Sellback Opportunities
Maybe your organization is especially forward thinking and has turned to Mother Nature
for its power needs. If that’s the case—or the idea simply piques your interest—you might
be fascinated to know that those electrical lines running into your organization send power
both ways. That is, if you generate more power than you’re using, you can sell it back to the
power company, as shown in Figure 3-3.
The practice is called net metering, and most states have laws that direct utility companies
to buy back power at the same rate you buy it from them.

NOTE States that don’t have legislation in place typically pay the wholesale cost of power—about 1
to 3 cents per kilowatt hour.

If your organization is considering relying on the sun for its power, and possibly to sell
back power to the utility company, you’ll need a few things:

• Photovoltaic panels These panels absorb solar radiation. They are made of silicon
and coated with tempered glass. Panels are typically mounted on the roof or on a
free-standing pole.
52 Part II: Consumption Issues

Power Company

FIGURE 3-3 Net metering allows you to sell power back to the electric company.

NOTE A company called Sunslates sells roofing tiles with photovoltaic cells built in. They’re about
double the price of typical solar cells. You can find out more via Link 3-3.

• An inverter This device regulates the power and changes it to alternating current
(AC). Inverters for a 6.5-kilowatt system run $3,000 to $4,000.
• A meter You need a meter that can run backward and can show how much you’re
sending back to the utility company.

True, not every utility will pay for incoming electricity. That will depend, however, on
your state’s energy policies and rules and whether your local utility is willing to work with
net metering clients.

NOTE Some people and organizations use wind power as a form of renewable energy. Wind power
requires a more expensive investment (it can cost $70,000 in equipment just to power a home), and
wind is more prevalent at higher elevations, which can mean upwards of 120-foot mounting poles.

There’s good news if you are considering renewable energy. The government is
encouraging using renewable energy and might offer your organization tax breaks. You can
also get rebates for any Energy Star devices you buy—such as monitors.

Low-Power Computers
Computer manufacturers are starting to offer low-power models that consume less power
than other computers. Of course, the workstations you need may or may not fall in line with
the specs for these machines, but as more and more companies want to save money on
power costs, look for more machines to be introduced.
In this section, we take a look at some of the offerings for Windows machines as well as
some Linux options.
 Chapter 3: Mi ni mi zi n g Pow er Us age 53

PCs
Windows-based PCs are the backbone of industry. Sure, there are some Macs and Linux
boxes out there, but most companies run on Windows. There aren’t too many low-power
models out there, but 2008 saw a number of new models introduced.

Intel
At the 2008 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, Intel unveiled 16 new products
based on the company’s first 45 nanometer (nm) processor.
The new processor boosts a PC’s speed, reduces power requirements, saves on battery life,
helps the environment, and comes in a smaller package for more fashionable and compact
computer designs. With the introduction of the new processors, Intel will be offering a total of

PART II
32 desktop, laptop, and server processors.

HP
HP has introduced its own low-power PCs, including the rp5700.
The PC touts a specialized design with additional cooling features. This allows it to be
in higher temperature environments than most other PCs. Its energy efficiency comes from
S3 power management, specialized Intel processors, and 80 Plus power supplies.

NOTE We’ll talk about 80 Plus power supplies later in this chapter.
The rp5700 also uses postconsumer recycled plastics and packaging as well as exceeds
requirements for hazardous material reduction.

Linux
Low-power Linux machines have largely been—like the OS itself—homebrew devices. An
enthusiastic tinkerer will decide he wants a low-power file server, so he’ll slap one together,
put his favorite flavor of Linux on it, and post the video of him doing it on his website. But
there are companies that offer their own low-power Linux options. Many of these are not
only inexpensive to run, but downright cheap to buy.

NorhTec
The Bangkok-based NorhTec offers a tiny PC (for less than US$100) capable of running
Puppy and other lightweight Linux distributions.
NorhTec’s MicroClient Jr. is 4.5 inches square and draws 8 watts of power. It uses a
166MHz Pentium–compatible processor.
The MicroClient Jr. is the smallest of the company’s line of extremely small, energy-
efficient PCs.
In fact, the company’s founder says he built the company with the goal of producing
sub-$100 PCs. The company has already sold PCs to clients such as McDonalds of Canada.
The MicroClient Jr. boots from CompactFlash rather than a hard drive. Other features
include:

• Fanless design
• 128MB SDRAM
• Input/output ports
54 Part II: Consumption Issues

• IDE
• 10/100 Mbps Ethernet
• 3 USB V1.1 ports
• Optional RS232
• CompactFlash slot for expansion
• 2.5-inch hard drive mounting

NorhTec offers several other models of small, energy-efficient PCs, including the following:

• MicroClient JrSX, with a 486-compatible processor and running DOS ($85)

• MicroClient Sr., with the same form factor as the MicroClient Jr., but with a 500MHz
CPU and a WiFi option ($195).

Excito
Swedish company Excito offers a low-power, quiet Linux file and print server based on
Debian Linux.
“Bubba” is based on a 200MHz ARM processor, and comes equipped with an 80GB to
500GB drive plus a customizable OS featuring a torrent/http/ftp download manager.
The Bubba server was designed to be left on all the time, without using much power or
generating a lot of noise. It draws a maximum of 10 watts.
Bubba’s hardware specs include:

• 200MHz ARM processor

• 64MB RAM
• 3.5-inch, 7200rpm 80GB, 320GB, or 500GB IDE hard drive
• 1 x 10/100 Ethernet
• USB 2.0 type A to printer or memory stick connection
• USB 2.0 type B to PC connection
• 7.2 × 4.5 × 1.7 inches
• 3.7 pounds

Bubba’s features—including basic file management, Samba file/print sharing, mail

transport agent, IMAP server, and webmail—are controlled via a web interface. An interface
is also provided for firmware upgrades.

Components
The big power draw is your server room, that’s no secret. However, a number of other
places within your IT infrastructure can save you some watts. You won’t see the huge
numbers adding up like they do in the server room, but every bit helps. Plus, if you are
replicating a setting change across hundreds or even thousands of workstations, those
savings will add up.
 Chapter 3: Mi ni mi zi n g Pow er Us age 55

Servers
You can reduce the amount of energy your servers use by deploying blade servers and by
virtualizing your servers.
Blades are entire computers contained on a card that can be inserted into a larger device.
As such, rather than one server taking an entire rack, 20 blades can be installed into one unit.

Usage
Blade servers consume about 10 percent less power than equivalent rack mount servers
because multiple servers share common power supplies, cooling fans, and other components.
Blades are popular because they not only reduce the amount of space needed, as
Figure 3-4 shows, but also because they use less power.

PART II
NOTE Currently, five manufacturers account for more than 75 percent of all the blade servers on
the market. These manufacturers are HP, IBM, Sun, Fujitsu/Siemens, and Dell.

Many organizations have a large number of servers, each running one application. This
separates and isolates the units, and if there is a failure only that application is affected.
Although there is some logic behind this setup, the reality is that each server only has a 5 to
10 percent CPU utilization rate. This boils down to a lot of hardware taking up a lot of
space, and not doing as much as it should.

NOTE In 2007, Symantec conducted a study that asked organizations if they were considering
server consolidation or virtualization. Of respondents, 51 percent said they were considering
consolidation, and 47 percent said they were considering virtualization.

Case Study
Ask.com has taken a unique tack in its efforts to maximize what its servers do and what it
gets from them in return. The company asked its server vendor, Dell, to build servers that are
customized for its very specific functions. That is, each server is built with specific memory,
processors, disk space, and power supplies, all tuned to the application the server supports.

Multiple servers can be Blade servers

consolidated and virtualized
onto a single blade server.

FIGURE 3-4 The work of many servers can be offloaded onto one server containing many blades.
56 Part II: Consumption Issues

Each box comes with only the components needed for each application. As such, the
overall cost is less than buying a server out of the Dell catalog. On top of that savings,
Ask.com has cut server power usage by 30 percent.

NOTE Ask.com isn’t the only company getting its servers custom made. Dell launched a program in
2007 in which it will customize servers for its largest customers—those who buy at least 1000
servers each quarter.

Computer Settings
Although establishing policies to govern your computers’ monitor power settings is a great
place to start (and we’ll talk about that more in a moment), there are some other places
where you can make more precise changes for real savings.

Polling
Periodic polling—that is, the computer automatically checking to see if a given action has
been taken—draws power from idling computers, because it automatically wakes the
computer up to check for a given event.
Every time an application polls for something, the CPU wakes from an idle state and
consumes power.
You might not be able to eliminate all your polling tasks, but you can manage them.
Let’s say you have 10 polling actions that occur within 1 second. Schedule them so that they
run immediately after another, rather than at various times during that period. Figure 3-5
demonstrates this.

NOTE If a computer is in an idle state, allow it to remain idle as much as possible. The more the
computer wakes up (for polling or from someone moving the mouse), the more energy it will
consume.

By grouping them together as the figure shows, the computer only has to come out of an
idle state once, rather than multiple times.

Turn Off Unused Devices

This seems like a no-brainer. If a computer or other device is not going to be used in the
foreseeable future, turn it off. Failing that, at least set up the computer so that it hibernates
after a certain period of nonuse.

FIGURE 3-5 One second

Group your timers
together so that
they reduce the
amount of time the Timers spread out
computer has to
be polled.
Timers running back-to-back
 Chapter 3: Mi ni mi zi n g Pow er Us age 57

Use Large Buffers

If your organization is one where media is played from a CD, DVD, or hard drive, make
sure that applications’ buffers are set large enough to store as much of the media in memory
as possible. Doing this reduces the hard drive, DVD, or CD drive from spinning as much
and thus saves power.

Storage
Storage is another big area in the realm of power consumption. Although you want to have
a measure of redundancy protecting your data, it’s simply wasteful and inefficient to have
hundreds of drives spinning away when a couple dozen will do the trick.
Chances are your organization’s storage started in one, logical way, but has since

PART II
become something else. Just by adding to what you have, the reasonable system you had in
place a few years ago has become Frankenstorage. Now’s a good time to reevaluate your
storage and see where you can make logical changes.

Green Drives
Green hard drives are drives that reduce the amount of power they use through a variety of
mechanisms, including unloading the heads during idle time to reduce aerodynamic drag.
Further, the drives calculate the optimum seek speed to use just the amount of power
necessary.
Western Digital is a major producer of green hard drives and estimates that its green
drives can shave off US$10 per drive, per year in electricity costs. For example, its 1TB WD
Caviar GreenPower hard drive uses about 5 watts less power than drives of the same size,
which typically consume 13.5 watts.

NOTE Western Digital is used here as an example. It is certainly not the only company to produce
green drives. Hitachi and Samsung also offer such drives, and the market is only going to open
up with more vendors, greater capacities, and speedier seek times.You can compute the math out
even further on this. A datacenter with 10,000 drives can save US$100,000 in annual costs.
Plus, carbon dioxide emissions are cut by 600 metric tons. That’s the equivalent of taking
400 cars off the road for one year.

NOTE Solid state drives (SSDs) have no moving parts and use much less energy. Although that fact
alone is notable, it is also worth noting that they are very expensive and don’t yet hold a great
capacity. For the price of one SSD you could buy more than 50 traditional hard drives. We
mention it here for the sake of completeness, but it is a very costly option and not as efficient.

MAID
A massive array of idle disks (MAID) is a system that employs hundreds or thousands of
hard drives for near-line data storage.

NOTE The term near-line is used to define the area between online and offline storage.
MAID is designed for write once, read occasionally (WORO) applications. In this model,
drives are spun up only on demand to access data stored on them. Because only a small
amount of the data is being accessed, these disks can be powered as needed, thus reducing
58 Part II: Consumption Issues

Drives powered down, waiting to be accessed Actively spinning drives

FIGURE 3-6 In a MAID deployment, only a quarter of the disks are spinning at any one time.

the power used to run them as well as reducing the generation of heat, which in turn reduces
cooling costs.
MAID differs from RAID in that it has increased storage density and is much less expensive,
thus saving power and the need for cooling.
MAID comes with some compromises, however, such as increased latency, lower
throughput, and much lower redundancy. Although a MAID solution can be slow—data
access can take a few milliseconds up to 10 seconds—it is much faster than tape, which can
take 60 seconds or longer to access data.
Also, because large hard drives are designed for constant spinning, continual shutdown
and reactivation threatens their reliability. Drives that are designed for repeated spin-up/
spin-down cycles are much more expensive.
The MAID architecture really developed because of the introduction of SATA drives that
are designed to be powered up and down. In a large deployment, MAID allows a dense
packaging of drives, and typically only 25 percent of the disks are spinning at any given
time, as illustrated in Figure 3-6. This helps with the problem of throughput.
The appeal of MAID is also apparent when you consider their use in large environments.
SATA drives are rated at 400,000 hours of life. If a datacenter has 1000 drives powered on all
the time, a drive would fail every 18 days. Clearly this is no good, so employing a MAID
system quadruples the drive’s life to 1.6 million hours.

Power-managed RAID
The idea behind RAID has always been to safeguard your data. But employing multiple,
always-on drives jacks up your power consumption. To deal with this issue, a new form of
RAID has been introduced.
 Chapter 3: Mi ni mi zi n g Pow er Us age 59

FIGURE 3-7 Unused

Power-managed RAID
RAID only uses the drives
drive where data is
being stored and
the parity drive.

Used
RAID
drive

PART II
Parity
drive

Buffer
drive

Power-managed RAID provides parity protection, but with only some of the RAID
disks actually turned on. When data is written, only the parity and associated data drives
are powered up. When data is read, only the disk being read needs to be powered up. This
is illustrated in Figure 3-7.
Nondisruptive and sequential read/writes are accomplished by staging the data to an
always-spinning drive, while the next drive is being powered up. The result is that your
organization can have hundreds of terabytes in storage in a single footprint.

Monitors
It’s no secret that computer monitors are power hogs. Even new monitors can consume
100 W of power while they are on. In sleep mode, they typically use 5 W or less.
Adjusting your monitors to automatically enter sleep mode after a period of nonuse is
a quick-and-easy way to reduce costs.
LCD displays aren’t necessarily less power hungry that CRTs. It depends on the model
and how much power it draws. It’s best to evaluate monitor power draws as part of your
feature comparison before you buy one.

NOTE A free tool to tell you how much power your computer monitors are using can be found via
Link 3-4.

Settings
The first place to start is by setting up your monitors to turn off after a certain period of
nonuse. However, you can make some subtle changes to your computers’ settings that can
reduce costs while they are turned on. Specifically, managing the colors on your monitors—
especially backgrounds—can save money.
60 Part II: Consumption Issues

TABLE 3-2 Different Color Watts Used

Colors Use Different
Amounts of Power White 74 W
Fuchsia 69 W
Yellow 69 W
Aqua 68 W
Silver 67 W
Blue 65 W
Red 65 W
Lime 63 W
Gray 62 W
Olive 61 W
Purple 61 W
Teal 61 W
Green 60 W
Maroon 60 W
Navy 60 W
Black 59 W

White and bright colors can use up to 20 percent more power than black or dark colors.
Table 3-2 show how much power colors expend.
Is the difference between a white background (74 W) and a black background (59 W)
major? Well, 15 W equates to about $17 a year. Multiply that by the number of computers in
your organization and you’ll see a difference.

The Power Switch

The best energy saver is, of course, to turn off your monitor. Some users might not know it,
but there is a power switch, usually located on the front or the side of the monitor. Turn it
off when the computer’s not going to be in use for a while, and you get the ultimate
savings—zero watts of energy used.
True, you can use the Energy Star settings in Windows to turn the monitor off after a
while, but those settings take some time to kick in.
Let’s say you’re going to lunch. Over your 30-minute break, there will be no savings for
the first 5 minutes; 20 percent savings for the next 5 minutes; 90 percent savings for the next
10 minutes; and 95 percent savings for the last 10 minutes. Energy Star saves 65 percent of
the monitor’s power during the half hour. Powering off saves 100 percent.
 Chapter 3: Mi ni mi zi n g Pow er Us age 61

NOTE Screensavers seem like they should save power, but they don’t—they just save the screen
from burn-in. After all, something is still being displayed on your screen. That said, not all
screensavers are created equal. If you must rely on a screensaver rather than powering down the
monitor, use a stock Windows screensaver, such as Marquee or Stars. These use less power than
custom-made screensavers. Also, have you ever noticed how your CPU (and the fans) goes into
hyperdrive when trying to render a complicated, animated screensaver?

Power Supplies
If you have a say in the components that go into your computers or other devices, use those
that conform to the 80 Plus standard. This requires power supplies in computers and

PART II
servers to be 80 percent or greater energy efficient at 20 percent, 50 percent, and 100 percent
of the rated load.
The EPA finalized updated performance requirements for computers and servers that
include the more efficient 80 Plus standards. These requirements took effect July 2007.

Wireless Devices
Radios consume power for both transmitting and receiving. Most laptop adapters use their
radios, even if they’re not connected to an access point (AP). Let’s talk about how you can
minimize excessive power output from these devices.

WiFi
APs announce their presence at regular intervals by sending a beacon packet. The default
interval for most APs is set to 100 milliseconds. The impact of the beacon interval is most
noticeable when it’s trying to find a network to associate with. This is shown in Figure 3-8.
Association requires a WiFi radio to tune to each channel and listen for the AP to
broadcast a beacon. The longer between the intervals, the longer the radio must wait on
each channel.
In addition to the radio overhead, the downside of a lot of broadcast beacon packets is
that with some wireless adapters, the computer must come out of power-saving idle states
to process the packets. For laptops that are close to the AP, you may be able to save a little
bit of power by going into the administrative page of the AP and increasing the beacon
interval.

FIGURE 3-8 The access point is

APs regularly constantly transmitting
transmit beacon beacon packets so the
packets so that laptops know it is
wireless clients available.
can find them.

Access point Laptops

62 Part II: Consumption Issues

This is a matter of fine-tuning on your part. You may not need a 100ms beacon
broadcast. If you can pare that number down, you’ll save radio power.

Bluetooth
Most computers now come with a preinstalled Bluetooth radio. Like a WiFi radio, Bluetooth
eats up power. A lot of it, actually. But unlike WiFi, Bluetooth is oftentimes enabled even
when it is not being used. If your laptops aren’t using their Bluetooth for anything, shut off
the radios and you’ll save energy.

Software
Although it’s possible to manage many power settings using Group Policy in Windows or a
similar tool in Linux and Mac environments, some companies are making the process even
easier and marketing power-saving software.
Seattle-based Verdiem said that by the end of 2007, 500,000 computers were using its
Surveyor software.
Surveyor is a networked-computer utility that can cut energy use by 30 percent per
machine by switching into low-power mode when a computer is not being used. Verdiem
estimates a cost savings of between US$20 and US$60 per machine, per year.
For more information about Verdiem and Surveyor, visit www.verdiem.com, or Link 3-5.

As repeatedly stated in this chapter, power consumption is a major issue. It affects the
environment; it affects your bottom line. By using the mechanisms in this chapter, you
should be able to see some appreciable cuts in your power usage.
But even as optimal as your system is, it’s still going to use power, and that power will
generate heat. In Chapter 4, we talk about what you can do to optimize cooling in your
server room.