5 tips for startups for handling the power situation

Recently we have had a few power outages in our office at Pune. After about 3 days of facing the crisis, I had to find a solution for this problem. Following are 5 tips for startups for handling the power situation. These tips are specifically for early stage startups.

1. USE LAPTOPS INSTEAD OF DESKTOPS – this is pretty much a no brainer. Laptops consume about 100 watts of power, while desktops consume 500 watts. Apart from the other obvious benefits I recently found out that – you can pretty much lie down on a bean-bag and still work on a laptop. This was after we bought a few bean bags in the office.
   
   
2. USE VIRTUAL MACHINES – this is one of the coolest ideas. Instead of buying 4 low powered machines buy one powerful machine and make 4 virtual machines out of it. So, an example configuration would be 2 x Quad-Core Intel® Xeon® processor E5410 + 16GB RAM + 1TB HDD – split it 4-ways to make into 4 powerful 2-core servers. Pretty awesome, 4 physical machines would consume 2000W power, while the 2xXeon would consume about 500-600W.
   
   
3. INSTALL A “TRUE ONLINE SINEUPS” – these are much more powerful than regular inverter/UPS. They are costly, yet worth every penny. This has much more battery power than a regular inverter/UPS, and can last much longer. They come in 6KVA, 8KVA and 10KVA, on the smaller side.
   
   
4. SEPARATE OUT THE BACKUP FOR SERVERS, laptops and fans/lights - The problem with that is – it adds another point of failure because of more failing parts. You don’t want to hear UPS’ beeping all day in your office.
   
   
5. MOVE TO A FULLY FURNISHED OFFICE that has generator backup – These cost upwards of Rs. 70 per sqft. Pretty high cost for a startup.
   

To summarize, tips 1, 2 and 3 are the really feasible options.

Got more ideas? Have questions? Send me a message on facebook or Twitter or send me an email at mukul dot kumar at pubmatic dot com .