Alpiron Suite Case Study: BilIinfo A/S

Bilinfo A/S produces an application for car-dealerships in Denmark. The application is distributed through 45 physical servers running Citrix Presentation Server. Over 2,000 car-dealers use their application every day.
 
BilInfo A/S is a subsidiary of eBay Inc.

Executive Summary

This case-study shows how BilInfo A/S, a subsidiary of eBay Inc. saves $20,000 in power consumption and reduces their CO2 footprint by 129 metric tons of CO2 per year.

Background

  • 45 physical servers
  • Most dealerships meet at work 08:00 and go home around 16:00
  • Some log in before 08:00, some stay logged in till after 21:00
  • Load on the server farm is very low on weekends
  • Alpiron Server set to automatically keep overall free capacity above 30% and below 60%.  And it will never shut down a server that has at least one user active.

It is important to stress that users are at no point aware that the Alpiron system is in effect. They are not affected by the system in any way.

Data collection

The data is collected from 10th September to 10th October 2008 from the BilInfo site, and concerns 45 IBM rack servers at 1U size each.
Data is collected using the built-in tool that exists in Alpiron Suite.
 
The following graphs represent the average values collected on the specific weekdays.  A few weekdays have been omitted for brevity.  The graphs for the omitted weekdays are similar to that of Tuesday.
 
Monday:

 

Tuesday:

 
 
Friday:

 

Saturday:

 

Sunday:

 

Result

As apparent from the graphs, Sundays are relatively busy weekdays for car-dealerships in Denmark.
 
During the month over which the data was collected, each server was offline for an average of 386 hours (703 hours in the period). This makes for 55% saved power per server.
 
Alpiron Server has been able to dramatically reduce the amount of power consumed by the servers and cooling-systems in the BilInfo Datacenter.
 
It turns out that most servers remain offline most of the day, while all servers are only online a few hours during peak load.  This behavior was highly surprising to the IT-manager of BilInfo as there was no way to monitor the load across the farm until Alpiron Suite was installed.  During weekends at most only 2 to 3 of the 45 servers are actually needed, leaving 42-43 off, saving enormous amounts of power.
 
The servers each consumes on average approximately 380 watts.  In addition to this, cooling, UPS, transformers, distribution frames etc. can be considered to consume at least an additional 50% of the power consumed by servers themselves. This makes a total of 570 watts per server.
 
At 0.76 Danish kroner per kWh, that’s 2087.16 kr. saved annually per server which totals 93922.10 kr. for 45 servers. That equals about $20,000 in pure savings every year.
 
In addition to the cash savings, the CO2 footprint of the organization has been reduced by thousands of pounds.  At 2.3 pounds of CO2 per kWh, each server accounts for 11484.36 pounds of CO2 or approximately 5.2 metric tons of CO2 per server annually.  With Alpiron, the CO2 footprint of running these servers is reduced by 2.87 metric tons, saving a total of 129 tons of CO2 each year.