Building Business Systems for Fun & Profit

I'm increasingly starting to notice stories like this one, about small/medium businesses taking environment issues more seriously and looking to reduce their carbon footprint.

This article talks about businesses buying more power-efficient servers, and indeed that's a step forward. But even better is getting rid of your servers completely!

You see, servers installed at small businesses are always going to be under-utilised - there just simply aren't enough people logged on and hammering them to keep them busy, that's why they tick along at something like 5% CPU usage all day.

That means 95% of their cost, 95% of the power they use and 95% of the carbon emitted as a result, is completely wasted. Needless wasted, too.

Your business lacks one essential ingredient for effective use of I.T. and that's scale. Even though you only need 5% of a server you can't buy only 5% of a server, so you have to buy a whole server which is 20 times more than you need...or do you?

I.T. on Tap works by bringing scale to the small business space. We aggregate the needs of all our small clients together, and then we're able to meet those needs much more efficiently than they could on their own.

For example, we estimate that every 1 of our servers replaces around 11 to 13 servers that our small/medium business clients would otherwise install and run at their offices.

That's reflected in the load on our servers: even with a more efficient infrastructure, our servers run at typical loads of around 50% - they're simply doing a lot more work, since there are fewer of them for the same number of people.

An 11 to 1 reduction, isn't that a HUGE cut in power consumption and carbon emissions? We think so, and that's why we're determined to get the word out:

Do your bit to fight climate change: turn off your server today!

A little bit of behind-the-scenes news this week: after extensive testing, we put a pair of new login/encryption boxes into use this week.

This is just the sort of behind-the-scenes techo stuff that goes on all the time, and that most of our clients are very pleased to never hear about it. I can understand that - techie stuff is exciting to us techies, but you'd probably rather we just got on with things and didn't bother you with the details.

The main reason I'm mentioning it because this upgrade had a visible impact: you probably noticed that the icons are bigger in your application window, and that logging in is now a little faster than before. Apart from that, it's business as usual.