Green Hosting and Carbon Neutrality
Over the past few months with the increasing electricity and fuel prices in the UK, we have tried to reduce the amount of power needed to run the office, the number of trips we make to clients and the amount of fuel we use to heat the office. This has meant that we now produce less than half the carbon we were generating a year ago.
Power consumption
The biggest consumer, a high powered workstation is now only turned on if high powered 3d graphics are required to run an application, typically this is less than once per month. This has been replaced, for every day use, by a thin client and a virtual machine running on the main development server in the office. The added advantage of this is that since it can't playback video well, the time that used to be wasted on sites such as 'you tube' when people sent links, is now more productive. (Yeah right... - Tech )
There used to be two or more servers in the office, a big powerful machine used for network storage, development work and other tasks and the gateway machine which acted as a failover server for a few of our clients in the event of their office going dark, these tasks have been either moved to other servers on the net or within the office, allowing the replacement of this machine with a small low powered router.
| Item | Watts | Quantity | Total |
|---|---|---|---|
| UPS | 19 | 4 | 76 |
| Firewall | 145 | - | 145 |
| Workstation | 240 | - | 240 |
| Monitors | 100 | 2 | 200 |
| Virtualisation Server | 170 | - | 170 |
| Managed Switch | 36 | - | 36 |
| KVM | 15 | - | 15 |
| Lights | 15 | - | 15 |
| Phone | 5 | 2 | 10 |
| 907 |
We managed to save over half the power usage by changing the way we worked.
| Item | Watts | Quantity | Total |
|---|---|---|---|
| UPS | 19 | 3 | 57 |
| Firewall / Router | 15 | - | 15 |
| Thin Client | 30 | - | 30 |
| Monitors | 100 | - | 100 |
| Virtualisation Server | 170 | - | 170 |
| Managed Switch | 36 | - | 36 |
| KVM | 15 | - | 15 |
| Lights | 15 | - | 15 |
| Phone | 5 | 1 | 5 |
| 443 |
We don't believe this is as far as we can go, we could possibly, when it comes time to change the monitors move to something lower powered, get a bigger UPS so we don't need to run three of them to cover all the power usage and prehaps change the switch to something lower powered although as managed switches go 36Watts isn't bad. None of these will save a vast amount compared to what we have already done, at best we would shave off another 100Watts (35Watts on UPSs, 20 on the Thin client, 20 on the monitor, 20 on the switch (if we go unmanaged)) and that is pushing it, although we are going to try.
[Edit: currently down to 400-410Watts, not sure how much else I can class as non-essential power usage. I might be able to swap my thin client for an older model that takes half the power, but I lose screen resolution (1600x1200 to 1280x1024) not sure if that is a viable tradeoff.]
Carbon Offsetting
We have chosen to offset the power using a carbon offsetting company, in addition to doing what we do anyway. For this task we have chosen to use climatecare. This company is backed by JP Morgan, so its not likely to be one of the shadier companies out there, also it seems to approach the idea by funding schemes in developing countries, by attempting to push green technologies where higher polluting alternatives would be used instead. This should work well in my opinion as it stops the inertia of polluting industries getting started in the first place.
While Carbon Offsetting isn't a real solution to the problem, it can at least make us more aware of the size of our carbon footprint. Since we aren't using a 3rd party auditing company, we are relying on our own calculations to make sure we are at least carbon neutral, where we can't be sure on the carbon use, we will take a guess and add a small margin. Eventually, we would like to run from 100% green power.
We can't do much to reduce the power of the servers we have in data centres around the world, although at least some of them are offset in other schemes (we will still try to cover these ourselves anyway), but where possible we have gone for energy efficient servers and attempted to get as much use out of them as is feasible, without running the risk of not having any backup should a server fail. Its a balancing act and one that we try to do well.
The office currently uses 443Watts of power according to the kill-a-watt meter in the wall. We round this up to 500 Watts and then add 250Watts (probably double what they actually use) for each of our two data centre servers. This gives us 24KWh/day to offset or just over 720KWh/month. This works out as 0.38 tonnes of CO2/month. At current offset prices, this works out as about £3.50/month.