Finding Savings in Your Underutilized Servers, Part 1

Most companies will look at ways to save by spending less on products and services, like downgrading to store brand cola when budgeting. These cuts are never popular and have been known to incite office mutinies, "Dr. Thunder, are you kidding me?" Before you deprive employees of premium products, first take a look inside your server, it may be full of savings!

The server is typically overlooked when making a budget; this is because budgeteers primarily save money by cutting expenses, and the server is already paid for, collecting dust in a closet. Servers are powerful machines, and the savings lie in the fact that they are often underutilized. A company that owns a cutting edge server, yet only has one or two applications running on it, is sitting on more power than what they really need--kind of like a teenager driving a muscle car.

Saving Money with Server Virtualization

If you have been in business for a while, then you may have multiple servers, perhaps each one is running a different operating system or designated for a specific application. Virtualization is a solution that allows you to take your multiple underutilized servers, and condense them into one for maximum server utilization. This makes sense if you are only utilizing 5-15% of your server capacity; this means you can fit 8 to 10 servers into one box, which can translate to a savings of 35-50% in owner cost reductions.

Another way underutilized servers lose money is through power consumption. Virtualization will significantly decrease your power bill by allowing you to consolidate your servers into one machine. Think of the waste of electricity from having one dedicated server running only one application, it is likely that you are not using the application for a full 8 hours in a work day, yet the server stays powered on 24/7. With server virtualization, you will also see savings with your cooling cost. Servers are basically high-tech space heaters and it can require a lot of energy to keep a server room cool. Budgeteers will right away notice that the electricity bill is an operating expense, so the money saved on energy bills (up to 80% for mid to large-sized companies) will help offset the expense of cloud services.

And you thought servers just held your company's data, it turns out you had a major budget booster right in front of you all along! At your next budget meeting, when department heads are nervously trying to find ways to cut cost without ticking everybody off, mention the savings of server virtualization and become the hero of the quarter! Preferred helps companies virtualize their servers every day, give us call at 708-781-7110, we will not only take care of the installation, but discuss how the savings add up.