With rising energy prices and growing concerns about global warming, power consumption is becoming a critical factor for data center budgets. The issue is compounded by high-density equipment such as blade servers, which need a lot of power to run, as well as significant HVAC resources. Properly planned and executed server consolidation and optimization initiatives can help organizations achieve hundreds of thousands of dollars per year in power and cooling costs – especially when servers typically run at only 5 to 10% resource utilization.

Plan for a Greener Data Center with PowerRecon
PlateSpin PowerRecon provides a powerful tool for accurately assessing the potential power and cooling cost savings and ROI that can be achieved through different consolidation scenarios. PowerRecon’s advanced analysis and reporting capabilities make it easy to cost-justify green data center initiatives and complete the environmental assessments and validation required to qualify for utility rebates. When PowerRecon is used in conjunction with PowerConvert, the combined solution effectively automates green computing initiatives.

Power and Cooling Savings Calculator
This simplified Power and Cooling ROI calculator approximates an ideal consolidation ratio using processor utilization data only and an underlying assumption that all server workloads are the same. In reality, server workloads are all different and calculating the ideal consolidation ratio is far more complex – factoring in a number of variables.

Enter information about your server environment below for a general idea of the power and cooling savings that can be realized through consolidation.

Before Consolidation
Number of physical servers before consolidation	servers
Average power consumption per server	watts per server
Cost per kWh	kWh
Average processor utilization before consolidation (typically 5 - 10 percent)	% processor utilization
Target processor utilization (per host) after consolidation (typically 30 - 60 percent)	% processor utilization
Virtualization overhead (% of processor used by the virtualization layer)	% virtualization overhead

After Consolidation
Number of servers after consolidation	50
Consolidation ratio (virtual machines per host)	10 VMs per host
Power & cooling savings per year	5,913,000 kWh
Power & cooling savings per year	$591,300.00 per year

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Assumptions:
1. All servers have identical hardware configurations.
2. Every watt consumed generates 1 watt of heat.
3. Air conditioning runs at 100% efficiency: Every watt of heat requires 1 watt to cool.