Cost Benefits of A Data Centre Health Check Audit

Carrying out an audit of your data centre or computer room may seem like an unnecessary expense. However, this is almost always not the case. An audit of any computer room environment, whatever its size, by an independent specialist will help you to identify where costs can be recovered or where investment is needed to ensure it meets your business need. For example, investing £5,000 in an audit may seem like a large investment, but it is important to view this in context. At today’s average price for a kilowatt hour of electricity of 9p, a kilowatt of electricity costs £788.40 per year. An average server will consume anywhere between 500 watts and 4 kilowatts. Assuming that your data centre has 100 servers installed within it and are drawing 500 watts each, this means that your electricity bill for running the servers alone is likely to be in the order of £39,420. Add to this the cost of infrastructure, (cooling, UPS, electrical losses, supporting equipment, etc.) which on average costs around the same as the server electricity costs and the total electricity bill is likely to amount to something in the order of £78,840.

Back to the £5,000 investment in an audit. By identifying the inefficiencies in the data centre, if only a 10% saving in electricity costs is achieved, the payback for the audit is just seven and a half months. But here’s the important point – that’s a 10% saving every year. For a specific data centre, the audit costs may be more or less than £5,000, but so will the savings. Imagine for example if you had 200 servers and achieved a 10% saving in costs – if the audit fee was £5,000, the payback would be just 3 months. Of course, no one can guarantee a 10% saving in electricity costs, but this is quite an achievable figure. Your particular data centre may just be the one that is actually 100% efficient, but we haven’t found it yet! And wouldn’t that be a great investment, just to confirm that yours was the most efficient it could possibly be!

Audits can identify many things that can improve efficiency, and therefore reduce cost. It may not be the most obvious things that are costing you money – it isn’t just about the infrastructure, the cooling, power etc., it is also about the way in which it is run. The most efficient infrastructure possible will be inefficient if the procedural processes around it don’t support the efficiency. An audit is not a criticism of the environment, it is a detailed assessment of how the data centre hangs together, how each individual component works with others to ensure that the most efficient and cost effective running is possible.

Our Data Centre consultants have carried out data centre audits for many organisations including banks, government departments, universities, the NHS, colocation companies, hosting companies, managed service companies, as well as many corporate environments. Investing a small amount of money in an audit can bring huge benefits. With power costs averaging at almost £800,000 per year, any saving, no matter how small, will have an immediate and lasting effect on the bottom line.