Shut down the network each night?

[Dieselboy]

Ref: https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/ogg6ga/new_msp_customer_shuts_off_servers_every_night/

Saw this post on reddit lightly mocking a owner of a business that hard powers off the mains power switch on the wall which feeds the comms room each night before they go home; because no one is there during the night and it's not needed to be up.

Of course this is funny - but actually, he has a point. Not only about the cost saving, but I'm all for shutting things off when it's not required anyway. Reduce the attack footprint.

Catering for this is tricky, though.

[Otanx]

I read that too. I think this is a short sighted move. If systems are not on overnight then when do you do backups? Patching? As long as they consider all the ramifications and still want to do it then go for it. However, the owner in this case was not doing shutdowns he was just dropping power. Never a good idea. So once you price in all the work to shut down the systems safely every night, and bring them back up in the morning the cost of saved power isn't going to be worth it.

- Otanx

[deanwebb]

Disconnect the Internet connection at night, I can get on board with that.

[mmcgurty]

Sounds like this business would be much better off running in the cloud.

[deanwebb]

Sounds like this business would be much better off running in the cloud.

Business owner: But how do you turn off a cloud?

Everyone in IT:

[wintermute000]

the issue is smooth shutdown of systems, and wear on PSU/HDDs.
If you have shutdown/startup procedures down pat then its just a case of playing the lottery on HW failure, to be honest I don't know enough stats to definitely tell, except that everyone says that poweron / poweroff is when stuff explodes (particular PSUs and HDDs).
Then there's logical isolation like schedule based firewall policies and VM auto shutdown / startup.

[Otanx]

So I looked up the numbers to see how it worked out because I am on a conference call. The highest cost of electricity in the US is 32 cents per kwh. For our racks we provision 10kw per rack. Double that because you need to cool the rack so 20kw. Assuming 16 hours of off time you get 320kwh saved at 32 cents comes out to $102.40 a night. Which kind of surprised me. So over a month you are looking at about $3,000 bucks. More if you are shutdown all weekend. Of course most of us don't pay 32 cents kwh, our racks are not fully loaded, and business hours are probably closer to 12 than 8 hours.

-Otanx