(Web Hosting News) Guildford, United Kingdom – Memset, the award-winning dedicated IT hosting company, has found that “ripping and replacing” servers that are over three years old is a must.
Whilst “sweating assets” has been seen to be the most effective way to squeeze out every conceivable drop of value from your hardware, in the case of servers, it’s simply neither economically nor environmentally sound.
For example, an average £1,000 1U rack-mount server bought 3-4 years ago probably “cost” (in terms of materials, manufacture and distribution) about 1,500kWh to make and uses 120W at moderate load, which yearly is 1,050kWh, or at least 1,500kWh when data centre cooling is taken into account. The latest equivalent “green” servers use as little as 80W, so swapping to energy efficient servers will save 400kWh/year in electricity and get you 2-4 times more performance.
In the past eighteen months, Memset has seen the power requirements of basic "workhorse" rackmount servers halve while their performance has doubled. In other words, if you simply replace 3+ year old servers with modern ones you can cut your power bill more than by half and get more than double workload capacity.
With good use of virtualisation to consolidate existing applications onto a smaller number of machines, thus taking advantage of the performance improvements, it makes clear environmental and economic sense to replace machines after 2-3 years. Alternatively, you can outsource your server infrastructure and consequent environmental impact practically overnight to a carbon neutral IT host such as Memset or Rackspace.
Most hardware vendors do a very good job of recycling servers (less than 2% going to land fill), and charities such as Computer Aid can refurbish and give machines to Africa where they are put to very good and efficient use, so the environmental argument is sound as well (provided responsible disposal of old equipment). Memset has recently started sending its outdated IT kit to Computer Aid International.
Tony Roberts, the charity's CEO said “We desperately need to increase donations to meet demand from African schools and hospitals and hope that businesses across the UK will realise that by partnering with Computer Aid they not only will become WEEE compliant but they can help stop over two million unwanted PCs going to waste.”
About Memset
Memset is an award-winning dedicated web hosting company. Established in November 2002, the company was the first to offer high quality, flexible dedicated server packages on a fair and scalable pricing model. The development of their Miniserver™ technology has enabled Memset to be recognised as the leading developer and supplier of virtual dedicated server systems in the UK.
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