Some interesting talks at the today’s Linx66 sessions at Goodenough College in London. Lex Coors, VP of international datacentre operator Interexion discussed the green datacentre. One of the slides that caught my attention related to best practice in how end users can keep their power consumption to a minimum.

Most of these are pretty obvious but worth reproducing here with the percentages being the potential efficiency gain:

eliminate comatose servers 10 – 25%
virtualise 25 – 30%
upgrade older equipment 10 – 20%
reduce demand for older equipment 10 – 20%
introduce greener more efficient servers 10 – 20%

If you add that lot up you potentially get more than 100% but it does give people a feel for where their efficiency savings and therefore cost savings can be made.

The original source was McKinsey and the Uptime Institute (2008).