If you've been in business for any length of time, you know how crucial it is to maintain peak efficiency in your procedures and systems – including your IT system. There's no way to get completely around the burning of electricity in any IT system, but the following suggestions from our Austin IT managed services team can help you improve your technology's energy efficiency.
Solid-state drives – Moving parts require considerable energy. This is one of the problems afflicting traditional hard drives, which must keep those internal disks spinning at high speeds. If you're looking for ways to update your technologies while also reducing your utility bills, this might be a good time to look into replacing your hard drives with solid-state drives. SS drives have no moving parts, which not means less energy expenditures but also faster speed and greater reliability than what you're running now.
Virtualization – how many pieces of hardware do you really need on which to run your various computing processes? Less is definitely more when it comes to saving energy, and that's where the idea of virtualization comes in. You might use a single server to run two or more operating systems, for instance, instead of keeping separate workstations for each purpose. You can also make use of Gravity's remote servers to lower your electricity bill further.
Power management features – How much use do you actually make of those power management features built into your operating systems? Both Windows and Mac systems provide options for spinning down drives and blacking out monitor screens after set periods of disuse. We can also point you toward additional power management programs that can give you even more ways to run your equipment more efficiently.
Need more energy-saving ideas? Contact Gravity Systems and let's discuss your IT system!
Related Post: Getting the Wires Right: IT Network Cabling Considerations