In 2008 we all got a shock when it suddenly became apparent, when power was cut, that Eskom had failed to plan sufficiently for South Africa's energy needs, and we were told that we were in danger of running out of reserve margin. For months, last year, we had "load shedding", with business experiencing lost productivity, and all of us spending more hours in traffic. Dire warnings were made, government talked about introducing penalties for heavy users and Eskom announced their intention of putting prices up by as much as 120%.

Eskom set to increase electricity tariffs

Then suddenly, in August 2008, the world lurched into recession,  buying South Africa inc some more time to sort out our power needs, unfortunately at the expense of much needed jobs. Mines have laid off people, while heavy industries have closed or reduced the use of their power hungry smelters and furnaces, but Eskom is still talking about raising tariffs way above inflation, and it is a matter of time before the economy recovers and we start to hit constraints again. In addition, government is still pushing ahead with its plans to introduce penalties for heavy users of energy.

All this means that it is still imperative for corporates to plan to save energy. One of the biggest consumers of energy, in non-manufacturing businesses, is IT. For decades we were told it was ok to leave your PC on overnight as it consumed so little power. In fact, we were told it was better to leave the PC on, than reboot it each day, which would lead to wear-and-tear on the machine, with the frequent power surge as it started up!

Ways IT can reduce energy usage at the data centre?

So what are the ways that an IT manager can reduce their consumption of electricity? There are some strange ways that have been suggested to reduce power consumption in data centres, such as moving your data centre to a ship, and using sea water to cool it, or submerging the data centre in oil, to make the machine run cooler! Whilst these ideas may yet prove to be useful they are not practical, nor viable today. So what are the ways one can reduce power consumption? That is what this blog is all about. We will explore ways of doing this with this blog!

The ways we will explore include:

• Server virtualisation and consolidation,
• Desktop virtualisation,
• Cloud computing,
• Green harsware, and
• any other workable approach that emerges

Stay tuned for updates!