Quick Win #2

Who Left the Lights On?

Quick Win #2

Turn Off the Lights on Evenings and Weekends

After hearing about IT’s full plate “keeping the lights on,” it’s nice to tell today’s CIO that it’s okay (and even preferable!) to turn off the lights too, when you’re not using them.

For cloud cost-cutting, we’re talking about non-production resources running in the cloud 24x7, 365 days a year:

Jay Chapel, vice president of growth, cloud solutions, at Turbonomic, says this about pre-scheduling (and turning off) such resources: “The #1 low-hanging fruit for IT organizations to achieve short-term cloud cost savings is scheduled suspension of non-production resources,” he says. “Non-production resources, such as those used for development, testing, staging, and QA, are typically only needed during a 40-hour work week. This means the other 65% of the week, they are sitting idle. Scheduling these to turn off when not needed is a straightforward, low-risk action to immediately reduce costs.”

Field CTO Hood says this: “Take the opportunity to focus on how to shut down environments when not in use. Development, redundant application servers, and disaster recovery (DR) servers are all great candidates.”

According to the CloudHealth report, setting less than 80 hours per week for non-production workloads to run in the cloud caused a large publisher to save “thousands of dollars a month” on their cloud bill. The report further claims such “lights on/lights off policies can often be even more effective than purchasing pricing discounts.”

David Olszewski, Stratascale technical advisor for hybrid cloud, maintains such scheduling doesn’t have to be an all-manual process, either. It can be automated via processes and policies to manage your cloud resources. For example, you can automate this according to your needs and schedule via the command line, APIs, or the use of cloud management software.