America’s 25 million small businesses are the heart of the American economy.  They produce 51 percent of nation’s private sector output, 47 percent of sales, and provide employment to over half the country’s private workforce. Since the beginning of the digital age, small businesses are personally responsible for the majority of computing resources and energy output. And while the result is an increase in productivity, there is also a financial downside in terms of power expenses.

In the past, small businesses hoping to go green were limited in their options by expenses and availability. As a result, around 1/2 to 1/3 of the 48 percent of the nation’s electricity and 39 percent of nation’s natural gas used for commercial and industrial purposes is wasted due to inefficiency.  That amounts to billions of dollars in electricity alone, with a large percentage being used by computing resources.

Now, after over a decade of this waste, new solutions are starting to appear.  As a small business, one excellent place to start is to use newly available products to adopt an efficient server infrastructure.  Many companies are offering exciting entries geared to help businesses small and large achieve this goal.

1. Energy Efficient Sun Fire Servers When small businesses grow in size and need dedicated mail service and file storage, they typically need to buy a server setup.  By the end of 2008, Sun Microsystems will have released several energy-efficient products, including the Sun Fire T1000 and Sun Fire T2000 servers with CoolThreads technology.  These new servers, according to Sun, will provide “30 times more performance while using one-tenth the energy and generating half the heat compared to products offered in 2003″.
2. Improving Hot Aisle/Cold Aisle With Containment Studies show that up to 60 percent of the power in a server room goes to cooling.  One green cooling method to consider is contained hot aisle cold aisle.  Hot aisle cold aisle is a best practice in which server racks are lined up with alternating rows with cold-air intakes all facing one aisle, hot-air exhausts the other.  This only provides small efficiency gains.  However, if you combine this with containment solutions such as plastic curtains, which separate the hot air from the cold, you can save more — up to 75 percent on fan energy by some estimates.
3. Low Watt Xeon ProcessorsIntel, the world’s largest microprocessor maker, offers several energy efficient variants of its Xeon processor, its 45 nm Penryn based offering.  The new processors come in both quad core and dual core varieties.  The dual core X5270 consumes 80 watts, but can run as fast as 3.5 GHz.  For quad cores, there’s the X5492, the X5470 and the L5430.  These models use 50 W of power, or a scant 12.5 W per core.  Powerful and efficient, these new processors are also halogen free, making their eventual retirement more eco-safe.
4. Consider The Switch To Linux Server OS Suggesting an OS is a tricky business.  In the server market the main candidates are Windows Server 2008 and the various Linux distros.  Part of the difficulty in making a suggestion is that some OS’s are naturally better at certain tasks, and some like Windows Server 2008 have some nice extra features.  That said, if you’re looking to save power, consider turning to Linux.
5. Putting It All Together As you can see, building an energy efficient server architecture requires a multi-tiered approach.  No one component will eliminate all inefficiency in the setup, but by selecting an efficient OS, low watt processors, an energy efficient server system, and efficient cooling that meets your needs, you can begin to save money and lessen your company’s impact on the environment.