Case Studies for Achieving a Return on Investment With a Hardware Refresh in Organizations With Small Data Centers

Data centers have been highlighted as a major energy consumer and there has been an increasing trend towards the consolidation of smaller data centers into larger facilities. Yet, small data centers exist for a variety of reasons and account for a significant portion of the total number of servers. Frequent refreshes of IT hardware have emerged as a trend in hyper-scale data centers but little attention has been paid to how these savings can be achieved in smaller facilities. This work provides a comprehensive framework for the energy saving opportunities while determining when a return on investment can be achieved to enable small data center operators to create credible business cases for hardware refreshes. Various data center deployment scenarios are used as case studies (based on real-life datasets) to validate the proposed concepts. Our results show that a return on investment can be achieved for organizations with small data center in less than two years and that these organizations can save more than three times their annual electricity cost over five years.