Every ski resort has a company server, a physical device where computer data is stored, files are shared, and information is managed. And managing that information within your company’s servers can be surprisingly costly on many levels. Resorts often have multiple servers that require thousands of kilowatts per year and cost thousands of dollars to operate. Not to mention the actual storage space for these machines and the cost of the servers themselves.

Like many industries in the 21st century, there have been major improvements in information technology to help streamline ­infor­mation life cycle management and reduce the cost of storage as well as energy consumption and energy costs.

For example, in 2010, Telluride Ski Resort, Colo., installed an EMC Celerra NAS device to improve the efficiency of the company’s server. The device has allowed the resort to consolidate 30 physical servers into three “virtual” servers, with shared storage for their respective data requirements. The Celerra device enables the sharing capabilities and therefore reduces the need for multiple physical servers to manage all of the data independently.

The Celerra device offers the combined benefits of consolidation with fully automated storage. It eliminates physical file servers and integrates storage with network-attached storage technology (NAS)—a computer data storage device connected to a computer network—that provides data access to a group of employees and clients.

This change in storage is completely transparent to the end user. The entire system still operates as if there were 30 physical servers, even though the NAS device virtually stores all the data that was in the physical servers, and costs much less to operate.

The major benefit of consolidating the entire system is that, 90 percent of the time, the physical servers weren’t doing anything, just sitting idle. Yet they still required energy for power and cooling. What used to take up three racks full of physical servers at Telluride now takes half of a single rack, with better performance and improved scalability.

As well, it’s easy to add more storage as needed. There are zero hardware costs, only an operating system license for the extra virtual storage. In the past, a company might pay $5,000 to purchase a physical server and pay additional costs to house, power and cool it.

Telluride found two benefits in the power savings. “First, the EMC Celerra installation dropped the powering requirement for the resort’s network operation closet (NOC) down to a fraction of the physical server power draw, and secondly, it has dramatically reduced the BTU footprint,” says Benjamin Whiting, Telluride’s director of information technology. “And with fewer BTUs to cool in the NOC, the cooling bill has dropped as well.”

Through this upgrade, the resort now saves an estimated 39,714 kWh per year, which translates into a reduction of $3,971 in annual powering and cooling costs. From an environmental standpoint, the device is capable of reducing the resort’s carbon footprint by 53,256 pounds of CO2 per year, for a total reduction of 213,024 pounds since it was installed in 2010.

The initial investment in an EMC Celerra device can range from $10,000 to $50,000 depending on how much storage is needed. However, the average cost for a traditional server is $5,000. For Telluride’s 26 original servers that is approximately $130,000. When the resort moved to the EMC device, it not only increased storage but reduced costs by half the expense of traditional servers with the same capacity