Performance and environmental awareness in business: it is possible.

When talking about Green IT we are mainly referring to power consumption. This consumption is not only important in terms of cost but it is also among the most significant sources of pollution. Since its foundation, Maehdros has always had an ecological focus, especially regarding the fight against wastefulness and pollution, always opting for the solutions which use the least energy and which respect the environment. This ecological and responsible attitude has increasingly been at the forefront of the global consciousness of society in recent times and Maehdros is no exception to this.

To reduce the power consumption of servers and their impact on the environment, Maehdros offers a server solution called Energy Smart which can reduce the power consumption of each server by up to 27%.

It uses the following measures to achieve this:

• Using low CPU consumption (HE range with AMD and L range with Intel) which have a lower energy coefficient (up to 32%, according to: http://www.amd.com/us-en/assets/content_type/DownloadableAssets/43761C_ACP_WP_EE.pdf).
• Continuous adjustment of power supplies and fans in accordance with the temperature of the components. Consequently, during the rest periods of the server (typically 85% of the time) the fans consume less power.
  
• The power supply of the servers is designed in such a way as to eliminate possible energy losses and their performance is greater than standard power supplies (up to 95% on blade servers).
  
• The server chassis can accommodate 2.5-inch disks which consume less energy compared to 3.5-inch disks.
  The gain is 7 watts per disk. (Source: http://www.dell.com/content/topics/global.aspx/corp/environment/en/energy?c=us&cs=555&l=en&s=biz et http://www.dell.com/content/topics/topic.aspx/global/products/pedge/topics/en/pedge_energy_2970?c=us&cs=555&l=en&s=biz).

Generally, in our studies of the provision and design of solutions, where performance requirements are not an essential criterion, we prefer virtualised solutions. These allow you to run multiple virtual machines on a single physical platform, thereby reducing energy consumption by up to 80%.

From the point of view of Maehdros, these energy factors require us to address two fundamental challenges:

• The first is how to reconcile commercial needs with the ecological awareness of the staff and the business.
• The second is technical in nature, namely how to manage a growth in energy demand while remaining efficient and profitable.

In order to address these two challenges we have adopted various measures, which are both technical and commercial:

• All infrastructure services and hosting provided by Maehdros (monitoring, emailing, dns, ...) are virtualised nowadays. In this way we have reduced our own power consumption by more than 75% (from 18A to 6A).
• All of our commercial proposals involving a physical server are now based on the Energy Smart configuration, at the same price as the standard solutions, which are less expensive, but which consume more power.
• Nowadays all of our servers are sold with a 2.5 inch configuration.
• We consistently offer virtual solutions over physical solutions except where these cannot be used as a result of technical constraints, which are mainly issues of performance, physical integrity, confidentiality, and server mobility.
  

Supplementary information on the energy aspects of Dell servers:

• General information on Dell PowerEdge servers (including the 2970) : http://www.dell.com/energy et http://www.dell.com/energy/poweredge
• (Technical) consumption comparison of different manufacturers : http://www.dell.com/downloads/global/products/pedge/en/pe2970ESDC_SPECfp0907.pdf