RAM | Reseller Advocate Magazine: Issue 76

By Chris Angelini

You already know the basic relationship between energy efficiency and the latest technology: Customers running old equipment stand to save quite a bit by simply upgrading to hardware that sips rather than gulps power. But do you understand the math behind that message? Are you prepared to back those claims up with some data? Demonstrating the power of saving energy is much more compelling than simply passing the message along.

When I get my electric bill, I check out the total, compare it to last month, and fill out a check online. Never before have I paid attention to what I used or how I was billed. If the amount is higher than normal, I chalk it up to too much air conditioning. When it’s lower, I pat myself on the back for saving some money. But rarely do I consider that four monitors in my office run 24x7. Two workstations are always powered on, and an entertainment center PC (plus 50” DLP) are often running as well. What would happen to my bill if I cut the consumption of those devices by half?

The Kilowatt Hour
Grab a copy of your latest bill and do a quick bit of math. On my bill, I see that PG&E charges for generation, transmission, distribution, public purpose programs, nuclear decommissioning, and a handful of other trusts and bond programs—each is broken down by category. I’m also given a baseline amount of energy I can use, which is billed at $.114 cents per kilowatt hour. When I pass that baseline by anywhere from 1% to 30%, the charge rises to $.129 per kilowatt hour. Past 31%, the rate skyrockets to $.226 per kilowatt hour. Ouch. Naturally, the more time you spend in that 130% band, the uglier your bill is going to be.

What exactly is a kilowatt hour and why does PG&E think my office should only be using 361 of them? As its name obliquely suggests, one kilowatt hour is 1,000 watts of power consumption for one hour. Turn on a 60 watt lamp and leave it on for an hour. You’ve just racked up .06 kWh of charges. Run an application server consuming 500 watts for a full day and you’re paying for 12 kWh. That’s $1.37 at my baseline rate, or $2.71 if you’ve gone over 130 percent. Now add up all of the equipment in your customer’s office, multiply by 30 days, and picture the carnage if he’s stuck using older, inefficient technology running slowly and at full load.

Being the Green VAR
In order to get a better idea of what resellers can do to educate their customers about energy issues, I sat down with Joel Gerlach, IT manager at CyberPower Systems, who’s on a bit of a power-saving crusade himself. “I have a meter that I use to measure everything,” says Gerlach. “Even when an appliance is off, depending on how they’re designed, some are still going to draw power while others aren’t. Measuring what different hardware is consuming can help determine what an SMB needs to do to improve efficiency, where it can cut back and so on.”
Remember, the idea here is to minimize consumption wherever possible in order to avoid paying a premium rate on power.

Here’s a great first example. When you compare the power usage of a CRT and LCD monitor, they’re not even close. I’ll compare two displays from Viewsonic, the 21” G220fB and the 20” VG2030m. One is a CRT still being offered for about $300 from the company’s Graphics Series, and the other is an LCD selling for roughly the same price with just as much viewable area. The CRT’s typical power consumption is rated at 115W while ViewSonic tags the LCD at 45W. I’ll save you the quick math and cut right to the results. Powered on for nine hours a day, the LCD costs about $52 a year less to operate than the CRT. Over the course of five years, that’s $260 in savings.

Now let’s be frank. The CRT supports much higher resolutions, faster response times, and better color rendition. But the LCD is more ergonomic. It’s more environmentally friendly and emits less heat as well. There’s a good reason—especially in a business environment—that LCDs are more popular. And yet, I still see so many businesses running entire offices full of CRT displays. If you’re looking for a way to help nudge monthly consumption down, displays are a perfect place to start because, as you can see, the long-term savings nearly covers the original purchase price.

VARs have lots of room to run with this concept of comparing older technology to what’s out there today and, rather than trying to sell hardware exclusively on the virtues of its performance, demonstrate how much money can be saved by adopting today’s technology. Just look at a couple of processors for proof. Intel’s old 2 GHz Pentium 4, based on the 180nm Willamette design, offered a scant 256 KB of cache and a 400 MHz front side bus. But because it leveraged that 180nm node, Intel still tagged it with a 75W TDP.Now look at the upcoming 45nm Core 2 Duo chips based on Intel’s Wolfdale design. Running at 2.6 GHz (on a much more effective microarchitecture, no less) with 6MB of cache and a 1.33 GHz front side bus, the Core 2 chip is immensely more powerful. Don’t forget that it features an extra core as well. And yet, your customer can expect a 65W TDP to go along with the CPU’s 64-bit extensions, Virtualization Technology, NX bit, and SSE4 instructions. At a price tag just north of $150, that’s solid value. Also remember that the Core 2 Duo includes Enhanced SpeedStep technology, meaning it’ll run at reduced power levels while the older Pentium 4 is sucking down the juice.

Saving Power in Servers
Take the technology discussion a step further and look at the systems you’re selling to SMBs. Servers are especially sensitive to power demands because they’re usually running around the clock under some sort of load. In fact, adding a single 1U server running SBS 2003 to the rack in my office made a significant difference to my power bill, pushing it well into the premium rate. So how do you pull consumption from the wall down right off the bat? Use the modern processors and reducedvoltage memory modules, of course. But the solution starts with an extremely efficient power supply.

We hear all the time about desktop supplies that break the status quo by offering more than 80% efficiency. What exactly is efficiency in the world of power supplies? Because PCs run off of DC power, a PSU turns AC input into DC output. But the conversion doesn’t happen 1W for 1W. Rather, most PSUs turn about 70% of the AC current into usable DC power, losing the rest to heat. We’ve discussed 80 PLUS in previous stories, but as a quick refresher, an 80 PLUS-certified PSU offers better than 80% efficiency at 20, 50 and 100% of rated load. Obviously, when you can get those 80 PLUS supplies into your desktop whiteboxes, you’re helping reduce overall power consumption.

But imagine my surprise when I sat down with Kenneth Chung, VP of sales at Terabyte Server Storage Tech, who told me that the power supplies his techs were installing featured better than 90% efficiency. The tiny enclosures, sometimes stacked two or three high in 1+1 and 2+1 redundant configurations, each delivered 400W, 500W, and 650W—more than some desktop supplies twice the size. During the course of our conversation, Chung mentioned that when the power supplies were installed individually, they achieved those 90% efficiency numbers. But when you start distributing the load across two or more, that figure drops to the 70s or 80s. Don’t interpret that to mean you should be pushing servers without redundant power. However, in a non-mission critical situation where the faint possibility of a PSU failure wouldn’t result in serious losses, a fixed supply could help save additional money on the power bill.

You’ve probably never considered blade enclosures as a play on saving energy. When you’re shooting for maximum computing power, though, blade enclosures pack the processing horsepower into the most diminutive space possible. CyberPower’s Gerlach gave me the example of HP’s new c7000 blade enclosure, a 10U, 16-server SMB behemoth with up to six 2,250W power supplies. Intelligence built into the box can shut down up to five of the six PSUs in order to maintain a peak load on the remaining unit, translating to those same 90% or better efficiency results. Sure, drawing multiple kWh per day from a single box isn’t going to be pretty at the end of the month, but when you can cut the consumption of an enterprise-class blade chassis by such a large margin just via improving its efficiency, why wouldn’t you? Resellers have access to those same power-saving measures through companies like Supermicro.

The SuperBlade is a 7U, 10-server blade enclosure with room for a quartet of 1,400W supplies delivering N+1 redundancy. Supermicro claims the same 90% or better efficiency numbers when its PSUs are running at their peak. When you compare the performance available from the blade to a series of 1U boxes with independent power supplies, your customers will see better efficiency numbers from the blade enclosure. If you thought blades were solely the domain of large businesses with racks and racks of servers, think again. This stuff is increasingly available to SMBs with a need for heavy computing power, and VARs are being lined up by the Supermicros and TSTs of the world to help enable highly customizable blades.

Saving Power When the Power is Off
Of course, you’d never think to shut off your UPS system—it needs to be up all of the time, ready to catch an outage and deliver reliable battery power. When it isn’t running on battery power, however, the UPS still draws power from the wall. According to CyberPower, a traditional UPS circuit with automatic voltage regulation delivers its output through a relay and transformer. When the current travels through the transformer, it conducts electricity and generates heat. That heat represents lost power and wasted money.
CyberPower recently solved the inefficiency problem with its GreenPower circuit design, which runs the UPS in bypass mode as long as power from the wall isflowing normally. When the utility power goes out, the UPS switches to battery mode and uses as much energy as a traditional unit. The rest of the time, you’re running much more efficiently and saving money.

Once you’ve measured the consumption of a customer’s IT infrastructure and have an idea of how much runtime is needed, you can pick a model with ample output. It isn’t necessary to sell a UPS with massive output just to extend battery life. Instead, shoot for a UPS that’ll be tasked with cranking out 80% of its peak load or less, then add additional batteries as necessary. For instance, CyberPower’s OL2000RMXL2U is good for 1,400W of output. Load the UPS with up to 1,120W and tack on ABP72VRM-2U battery packs, which can be daisy chained to add up to 275 minutes of backup power. By shooting for the most efficient configuration, your customer can be sure he’s making the best use of the energy being delivered to his business.

TAKING FULL ADVANTAGE
Businesses are charged for every fraction of a kWh that comes from the wall—often times at different rates, depending on how much power they’re using. When you understand how power is billed, how to minimize the amount of power being drawn, and how to maximize the efficiency of power pulled from the wall, you’re in a great position to save SMBs a lot of money. In many cases, it’s even possible for modern hardware to pay for itself compared to what your customers are paying to power older technology, such as CRT monitors. There’s a lot of confusion out there when it comes to understanding power. Be the reseller who adds value through education, knows how to pick the right parts for the right environments, and upsells with the client’s welfare foremost in mind.