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Green buildings, Green Server Farms?
mstansberry writes "Has IT evolved to the point where it can consider energy efficiency without sacrificing uptime or performance? According to an interview with APC's Richard Sawyer, the answer is yes. The green buildings movement, spearheaded by the USGBC and other organizations has some people thinking about computing infrastructure's impact on the environment. Is it an IT issue or something from C-level executives?"
Last time I checked my computer was a box full of toxic chemicals
Considering my mac mini takes less power than just my AMD cpu, let alone not talking about the video card, etc... Im really wondering if the push for massive cpu power at the cost of extreme electrical usage is really worth it.
Green everything should be a good thing, but what if the cost of green than reclamation and regeneration?
Even without environmental questions. CPUs have been getting faster and faster per dollar you spend on them, but they haven not been getting faster the same way per _watt_ you put into them. And each watt put into them also costs power to cool them.
This applies even in the home. Here in California, land of the 14 cent kwh, a 100 watt PC running 24/7 costs $120 per year in power. In a 3 year life the power is more expensive than the CPU or any other major component except perhaps the monitor, sometimes more expensive than the whole PC.
This also plays big on ideas like getting an old computer and putting linux on it to act as a router or music player or other special functions. You are much better off buying a dedicated box like a WRT54G than making use of the "free" old hardware.
And yes, this does have environmental issues, but you can see the problem right away just by looking at costs.
Has it been over a year since you last donated to the Electronic Frontier Foundation
Make enormous energy savings simply by consolidating services...
Stop buying new servers and extend the lifetime of older ones. (Account for the energy costs of manufacture as well as running costs.)
you had me at #!
Would be racks and racks of laptops! No need to by expensive low-power servers, just pump money into high-end laptops that already run low on power. And the best thing is, I don't have to pay for APC's, as they all come with batteries!
Soviet Russia, where the patriotic red clusters little green you!
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
"Interview?" More like, "opportunity to mention APC's UPS efficiency and then yack about how important that is."
Somewhere, APC's PR firm is quite pleased.
Please help metamoderate.
We wrote about the environmental benefits of virtualization on our site a while back. I even started a little thread on Nanog about any numbers on relationship of server utilization and the energy cost, but it looked like few people cared. To see how underutilized your Linux server is, do:
# cat /proc/uptime
1122029.25 1101982.75
The first number is the system uptime in seconds, the second is the number of seconds it's been idle. The number above is from my laptop - 98% idle.
Virtualization is also going to be the way hardware vendors will keep the server price up - suddenly very powerful servers will start making sense. The questions is - who will win - Xen, UML or Linux VServer. We're banking on VServer. :-)
I thought I was filling out the cover pages on my TPS Reports properly, but I don't know what a "C-Level Executive" is. Do I have to meet with the Bobs to find out?
I want a low power/low heat computer because I want to be able to leave it on all the time. Every PC I've had has been both a computer and a space heater. It is hot enough. I want a computer without the space heater. It isn't that I care so much about global warming. I care about the warming in my own house and all the wasted electricity I have to pay for (both in the PC and my extra AC use). The problem is that it is hard to find a low heat PC. I would like to take the motherboard I have out of the case and drop in a low-heat one. But, all I can find are extremely overpriced complete systems with the obligatory Windows pre-install.
The previous comment is purposely vague and generalized, but all of the facts are completely true.
(Formerly Grow Room)
P.S. That skunky smell is ozone. Yeah, ozone. That's the ticket.
The mini reminds me of a friend who used an old 68k macintosh as a webserver. her desktop was plugged into mains power but the little web server only used 17w of power to run all day every day, and was on a solar power setup with battery backup. last time I heard from her it had gone down from lack of power only twice in a year.
I bet if it wasnt a home built power system but a professional one with some better power management it could be used 24/7 too
It only really just mentions cost and green. I could say to someone "data centers have huge electrical bills and you can save a lot of money by using energy efficient equipment". That's basically what the article says.
What about specific solutions? Even just general principles? Where would someone look to get help in reducing energy costs? What about alternative energy supplies? Are they reliable enough? Enough power density?
I would have liked an article with a lot more information.
Helping with organizational effectiveness is our job.
Umm... this is only with MS products. Most OSS software can be complied and ran on a 486. MS however adds a lot of overhead on top of what a server needs. A standard web server that is current would require at least 500MHz processor with 256Mb RAM and almost 2Gb of HDD space, (if memory recalls correctly.) Installing the newest debian, BSD, Gentoo or Slack without X, (since this is optional on these systems and a requirment for Windows,) could run on a 486, 32Mb RAM, (more is better,) and about 300Mb of HDD space.
Of course you can install an older version of Windows to save on hardware requirements but you end up sacrificing security updates. Why do that?
Last time I checked my computer was a box full of toxic chemicals
Ah! but what color are these chemicals?
air and light and time and space
That drives initiatives like consolidation. If you have 10,000 servers that are only 20% utilized, can't you get by with 2,000? The answer is probably no. But you might be able to get by with 4,000 and cut your cost in half on the equipment side. And then you start to look at not only the capital investment, but also the expense investment.
What kind of wacky PHB approves the purchase of 10,000 servers when he only needs 4000? And more importantly, is he hiring?
-- If god wanted me to have a sig, he'd have given me a sense of humor.
Save money, don't buy more machines, balance the performance more evenly. Condor, Sun Grid Engine etc.
Deleted
Okay, maybe me.
However, these new |337 modded overclocked mega-boxes with a zillion fans, accelerator cards, lighting, speaker systems, external super-spinning hard drives and 300-watt power supplies use a tad more fuel than that.
I'd guess that with a CRT monitor, you're looking at an annual cost of at least twice that for a standard-vanilla (non modded) desktop, and the mods go up from there.
I agree with the post about using laptop parts, and if I'm correct, that's what some manufacturers are starting to do. They're a bit more expensive, but far more energy efficient.
--- Dan
Server software technology keeps getting worse, as .NET, J2EE, Perl, PHP, Flash etc. are deployed for pages that could just as well be static.
How many barrels of oil per day go into "ad personalization"?
Treat me like a marketing stat, and I'll treat your movie like a series of ones and zeros
It seems like it's an issue that has relevance to both, since executives can likely benefit over the long haul (tax incentives to go green, the PR value, lower power expendatures, etc.), while IT people will be intimately involved in any implementation of green measures that relate to computing.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
I think we can save more energy by becomin Luddites and stop using lumnix hacking computers.
Then we can allow the verdant greenery to cover the earth once more and never use the damned computers which ravage our hands and minds.
How would one build something like that? Battery backup with integrated solar recharging looks like a fine project.
Pollution might not be a strictly "IT" issue. But neither is "paycheck", and that issue is a top priority for most people in IT.
--
make install -not war
They built it.
It cost about twice as much as the existing PC p/s.
Virtually nobody bought it.
End of story.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
For many applications, the location of the server is not that important. Servers could be relocated to a cooler climate (avoiding the overhead of air-conditioning) or to an area of lower-cost electricity (e.g., Norway has aluminum smelters that take advantage of low-cost hydropower). At the very least, the server could be collocated at a nearby power plant to reduce transmission losses. One could also look into cogeneration -- using the heat of the server to warm water that is then used for another industrial process.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Have terrible performance, it's why laptops are usually miles slower than a desktop system. Servers usually need the fastest hard disks you can find for them.
Deleted
Hmm... was the DC from the batteries going straight into the computer (which would assumedly involve messing with the power supply - ucky), or getting first converted to AC and then back to DC (very lossy)?
Freeze Ray. Tell your friends.
"Last time I checked my computer was a box full of toxic chemicals"
Wow! Who knew jerking over your computer was so hazzardous?
A little bit like this?
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1) Seasonic S12 series high-efficiency power supply. It makes a VERY noticible difference.
2) Athlon 64 CPU (preferably the new Venice or San Diego core) and Socket 939 motherboard. Enable PowerNOW! power management (current Linux distros like FC3 support it automagically, some BIOSes don't enable it by default). The CPU runs at 800MHz at 1.1V core while idle, jumping to full speed as needed (just like a notebook). Even at full speed power consumption is about half that of an Intel P4 blast furnace. Run 64-bit Linux and get even more work done per watt.
3) Avoid high-wattage video cards like the GeForce 6800 series in favor of 6600GT's. MASSIVE power consumption difference. Depending on how hard-core a gamer you are, the 6600GT's are good enough and a lot cheaper.
See Newegg, etc for the parts.
This is the exact reason I moved from two desktops with CRTs to two notebooks, one with an external LCD:
cool, quiet! instant on/off (no long boot/shutdowns required and no reason to leave them running 24/7), portability (work in the warmest/coolest part of the house or even go to some place air-conditioned-- that was before I bought a house with central air), far-lower power consumption.
I run Debian unstable on both notebooks.
Gagging on the cost of a notebook? Get a refurbished Thinkpad (particularly a T-series). Worried about playing games or some high-end activity? Well, compare the amount you use your machine for that activity (ie. if it's only a few times per week/month then you can use the big-iron box just for those activities and the notebook for everything else)
Or buy a console for games. Personally, I content myself with the games that come with Gnome.
If you're not interested in running your own alternative-energy IT setup, you can always outsource it:
Solar Hosting uses renewables (i.e. solar, hence the name) to power all their web servers.
Looks like they offer a complete solution package, from web design to hosting.
3D Printing Tips and Tricks at Zheng3.com
Because they are already there. In fact I'd say 90% of all web sites out there are already running on less than the power of a 486 today. All 3 of my extremely low-volume web sites, for example, are not even running on real hardware. They are all virtually hosted along with hundreds of other sites on a single high power box. Web hosting companies operate on such a slim margin these days that they are the first to take advantage of any technology that saves energy.
STFU about slashdot bias.
C is for Chief, as in Chief Information Officer, Chief Executive Office, etc.
In America, it also refers to the grade-point average they barely managed to maintain while drinking their way through college and bonding with their frat brothers' dads so they could get hired onto corporate management tracks at age 23 so they could schmooze their way up to officer-level positions by age 46 and make outrageous salaries "providing leadership" for the rest of us and offering cushy internships to their sons' marginally-literate frat brothers. Not that I'm bitter.
You shall see a cow on the roof of a cotton house.
Assuming you are running a portable operating system and applications, it would be useful if vendors quoted the MIPS per Watt that their systems delivered. Back in the days of big iron, people paid close attention to the number of MIPS a system delivered, what their jobs required, and what was the most cost-effective model for their needs.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Its funny that this topic appeared on /. today - I've been considering changing my computers to make them more energy efficient.
My electric bill has been increasing, thanks to having an ever increasing number of servers and workstations chugging away whilst I do development work on them.
I've also moved from Windows to Linux devlopment, and have been shocked at just how good Linux is... good as in how little it needs in terms of hardware:
The joke is that the Linux machines are far more responsive than the Windows machine (and how little space the OS and applications occupy - how I hate bloat). Sure, compiling seems slower, but when running code, they just fly.
So, by moving to Linux I don't need high-powered machines, which means the costs are much lower (both capital and running. Being a bit of a geek, I'm probably going to throw the PSU out of the Linux machine and replace it with a DC-DC converter fed by a solar-panel... so my computer running costs will be effectively free... and the capital outlay for the solar panels and DC-DC is rather modest (thing 100s not 1000s of Euros).
.Now, if more people switched to Linux, they could use less hardware hungry machines, which need less power (and could easily run from solar).
It's a great idea, that I was hoping the article would expound on. Now I'm tempted to work up the numbers, comparing a full AC-fed battery backup system with a solar-based off-grid power setup. with a separate HVAC system for temperature control, the solar system would completely replace the traditional online UPS. In fact, this would be something I'd love to make money as a VAR selling to people. I'm sure tax advantages and environmental recognition are even possible.
"On the other hand, I live in Minnesota, and 5 months of the year, we can use that server energy to heat the rest of the building. :)"
There use to be an alternative energy technique were heat was stored in a thermal tank. During the summer, instead of piping the heat to the outside (air conditioning). It was piped to the tank. When winter hit, the heat was pulled out, lowering the temperture in the tank. So when summer hit, the cycle reversed, and in a way you were pulling cold from the tank.
...there is a nasty issue from reality to deal with: in many IT departments, the admins and web masters don't have the ability to deal with these boxes. I work with a large metropolitan library consortium setting and the department is full of reasonably skilled people who are willing to take the lesser pay that libraries can afford. But of the 15 to 20 people they staff, I would say that only five of them have the ability to be able to support something like a Linux server running Apache.
The guy who is their webmaster isn't much of a webmaster, but at least he's got a library sciences degree (this is another problem in many settings: elitism based on credentials). This guy can only drag and drop files using Windows shares from his PC to the web server. Most of what he does is double click on set up programs that install prepackaged, specialized, web applications for libraries. He excels at public relations and takes most of the credit for the work of his staff.
I think that you will find this is common to many environments. Unless there is a way where the admins and webmasters can just double click their way through life, low powered boxes running some Unix variant are going to be impossible to sell. Add to that the fact that many fields are being attacked by companies offereing substandard products that get sold to PHBs as panaceas and you have a no-win situation. The crap software is expected to solve every problem, but brings with it at least 100 times more problems than it solves. However, since the sales and packaging are so slick, it doesn't matter to the PHBs. They have no idea what's really happening in the IT departments.
Use a laptop then. The conversion is done on the power strip. Take out the battery and just run off your custom solar power supply then no lossy conversion and you don't have to alter a power supply.
What a strange question, it's any one's problem when we unnessecarily consume energy or any other non-renewable resource!
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
...lowering the financial/electrical/environmental cost of operating servers would be a good idea. More than a few peakist/depletionist people subscribe to the Olduvai theory, where an inability to keep up with electricity demands will cause the meltdown of society.
I'm not sure I buy into that, but when push comes to shove, there will have to be ways of running things more efficiently, if we really want to have them in the future. I think the internet, if it's still around, would be very helpful in a post-peak world of lower energy. So yeah, more efficient use of energy by server farms all the way down to PC users would be great. Plus, you won't HAVE to buy 11Ghz cpus with 2Gb graphics cards that require refrigeration units 'cause DOOM 5 AND HALF LIFE 3 AIN'T GONNA GET MADE. Having the 0wnx0rz gaming PC won't be all that helpful (nor easy or cheap to power). Lower powered desktops and laptops will be hip for the first time.
Solar Host does exactly that.
www.wavefront-av.com
American Power Conversion.. the market leader for UPS's (no that is not a transport company).
Customers don't think about their power bills when they're buying computers, typically. They think about how fast their browsers come up or their screens refresh.
:-).
Engineers don't think about overall power efficiency when designing a computer, typically. They think about getting the heat out of the components or out of the case, depending on what part of the problem they're tackling.
If the customers wanted more watt-efficient computers, the engineers would optimize for that.
On the other hand, this seems like a great spot for someone to begin selling a thermocouple-based server rack cooler. It's not a perfect solution, but you could probably make a thermocouple cooler powerful enough to run its own LEDs or something
Raise your children as if you were teaching them to raise your grandchildren, because you are.
" Server software technology keeps getting worse, as .NET, J2EE, Perl, PHP, Flash etc. are deployed for pages that could just as well be static."
Translation: This change scares me. Please stay the same.*
*And NO, most of that technology ISN'T used for "ad personalization". The majority isn't even connected directly to the Internet.
Both of my Window$ PCs run a grid app. I think grid computing is going to become ubiquitous, so the cost of power per CPU cycle is going to matter.
Laptop-type low power technology will be important. LAN speed matters more than disk speed.
I think that low power, low noise, high peformance PCs will replace the current trend of faster (and more) memory, faster memory speed, faster CPU speed. Individual CPU speed won't be so important in a distributed computing environment.
Best regards.
...which would be similar to referring to a box of tissues as a box of Kleenex?
it was my HDs that were giving off the most heat before i stepped up to 8X agp. so if you know anything you know i'm not bleeding edge pimped out ... but i was running 17 fans until last year when I did go to 8x agp and then i had to add another. that is all on a 500 watt power supply.
"He's a real midnight golfer"
During the good years (gone but not forgotten), I worked in several large office buildings.. Six, eight and ten stories, none of which could be considered new and I can tell you the people who designed them had no idea what the PC computer revolution would bring. With anywhere from fifty to two-hundred PC's to a floor the buildings air conditioning system in each case was totally incapable of handing the kind of heat thrown off by that many PC's. In one building (in the warmer months) they had to have someone in at 5am to crank the air conditioning as low as it would go (the air conditioning system was centrally programed to shut off at night, nothing we could do about it), then as the day went on it would go from 60 degrees with all machines off to just under a 100 by the end of the day.
On my last move from one building to another I was thinking how buildings now should have some kind of special exhaust conduits built into the floor with exhaust ducts on the PC's like a gas dryer. That way the buildings air conditioning system wouldn't have to deal with all that, and in the winter time you could use that heat to help warm the building.
The article notes in passing that a watt-year costs about a dollar right now.
But the big glaring omission in the article is cooling costs. Every dollar spent on electricity is probably tripled when you add in cooling costs. You have to buy the air conditioners, maintain them, and supply them with electricity. Then you have to buy a bigger UPS and backup generator to run them. Plus the bigger air conditioners and UPS take up space that you can't use for servers.
Get used to energy issues becoming more and more important to (intrusive on?) computing. Humanity has reached that point where two of the three fossil fuels (oil and natural gas) will get much more expensive, and possibly with significant shortages, within the lifetime of people reading this site.
If you're an energy newbie, check out The Cost of Energy (http://www.grinzo.com/energy), a site devoted to helping beginners get up to speed on energy issues.
As I recall, a while back Compaq used to make DC power supplies that you could order as an option for your server to go in the hot-swap slots instead of the AC units.
The Datacentre was wired for DC instead and all the power conversion was done ONCE from the mains feed by a big AC/DC converter (basically what a UPS does anyway).
As the AC/DC conversion was already done, the DC power supplies ran cool, the failure rate was lower, the AirCon bill was lower and the power bill was lower (the single point for AC/DC conversion was more efficient). Oh, it was quieter too (less fans!)
Shame was as it required a fully DC-wired datacentre the concept never really flew, shame really.
"I would think this would work well in a warm day/ cold night setting but storing heat for 5 months in a big tank of water would need tons of insulation."
It wasn't water. If memory serves? It was basically a thermos bottle filled with a form of salt (not table salt).
>> management it could be used 24/7 too
With some proper engineering, I believe that a solar system can be more reliable than edison. A top-quality inverter can draw power from solar panels, a battery bank, start up a generator remotely, and if all else fails, THEN draw power from edison as a last resort. If the equipment is reliable and well-maintained it's not out of the question to expect 5 to 10 years between outages. Further, since the owner/user of the system is in control, intentional outages for upgrades/repairs can be timed for convenience.
However, in the 17w mac server situation, it's probably not cost effective. At edison rates in my area, 17w works out to $1.80 per month. The smallest, cheapest starter system at backwoods solar electric systems is $800.
$800 ÷ $1.80 = 444 months = 37 years for payback of the initial investment. This is beyond the usual 25 year lifespan for solar panels and way beyond the 5 year lifespan for lead-acid batteries.
I've always been intrigued with solar power, but I just can't make the numbers work. I'm hoping to power up some outbuildings with solar, but these will be really cheap DIY jobbies that don't have to be 24/7 more like 5/2. This can actually be cost effective because it saves having to run buried cable, which is very expensive.
If you have a battery system and an inverter big enough to run everything, start feeding those batteries from solar panels. When the batteries are full (default state), run the inverter and run on sunlight all day.
Building a sun farm over your server farm makes sense to me. Oh, sure, payback is like 10 years when you buy a photovoltaic generation system. I hope some current server farm operators expect to be around that long.
Start Running Better Polls
Actually, to take the planks out of my own eye first, I probably ought to shut down the PC at 5:00p myself. (I'm at work) :-) The Macs at home (should) automatically go to sleep, though they haven't lately...
-Rob
Marriage doesn't have to suck!
You must be out of touch if you think the vast majority of people use that much power all the time.
PSU Needs Calculator
Using this calculator, a sample system I just made up only needed 319 watts of peak power. To get that, I needed to be running the 3gig barton chip, 2 sticks of ram, 2 hard drives, a Radeon X800, sound, NIC, with 3 fans fullblast and 2 cathode tubes, and a dvd player. Keep in mind that's PEAK power required, which means all of that has to be going top speed to get there, which means something along the lines of running 3D mark while copying a dvd from one drive to the other while playing sound while downloading a file over the internet while having all your fans and lights cranked up.
Hate to break it to you, bud, but just cause you have it doesn't mean you are using it.
Never confuse volume with power.
Back in the .COM days, I remember a great business plan that got funded to build the ultimate colo in Alaska. Features it was going to have were
- Free air-conditioning - since cool, clean, dry air is a plentiful resource in alaska.
- Unmatched power resources - They were going to build it & a refinery at an oil well so they had no concern for fuel delivery interruptions; and since you wouldn't be shipping oil across the oceans to feed their plant the fuel would be cheaper (no transportation costs) and cleaner environmentally (no oil slicks)
- Unmatched physical security. - They had found a space with tens of miles of tundra in all directions, so their security force could see threats coming miles away.
I forgot their name, though. Wonder what ever happened to them.If the power is coming from the sun and the arrays are providing enough juice, who cares if it's lossy?
A computer thats the size of tv remote, as fast as a mainframe, uses as much power as a wrist watch....
and is programmed entirely in assembler!!!
My pocketbook.
:) I especially like nanosolar's approach (taking an orderly molecular matrix and using it as a template for insertion of molecules at proper spacing for efficient solar power generation), although we'll have to see if they can pull it off in bulk.
Solar power systems aren't cheap. Hopefully at least one of the ongoing research projects into organic solar systems will fix this.
Freeze Ray. Tell your friends.
I've used other distros, but I eventually, after much hit-and-miss settled on gentoo - and its compile everything methodology for the following reasons
If you compile everything from source, then you know that everything works. In the past I had problems because of the way other distros package their system... they forced their choices onto me, which meant that, for example, I was unable to drop cvs and replace it with cvsnt.
Plus, by compiling everything, you know that the maintainers of the software have given you everything you need to compile you system... with a binary-only approach, the say will come when you want to tweak the system, so you decide to grab the source, mod it, then compile it... and that's when you discover the maintainer missed something, or it won't compile due to dependencies with your system.
So, I'd rather burn a few millwatts of power compiling, rather that blindling grabbing a binary distribution and installing it
.Also, its not as if I'm constantly rebuiling my system... on averge I do a complete rebuild every 6 months (from Gentoo stage1)... and the systems that are up and running get minor updates every month or so... looking at my logs - thanks to Cactus (http://www.cacti.net/), my avergae CPU usage is so low, the blips when doing a major compile hardly show.
Finally, its kinda cool to compile your own Linux system from scratch!
"With some proper engineering, I believe that a solar system can be more reliable than Edison. A top-quality inverter can draw power from solar panels, a battery bank, start up a generator remotely, and if all else fails, THEN draw power from Edison as a last resort. If the equipment is reliable and well-maintained it's not out of the question to expect 5 to 10 years between outages. "
There are some problems with this.
1. Batteries suck. Flat out they are boxes of acid and lead. Read any of the solar energy magazines and you will find huge articles discussing battery safety. The Batteries in most ups's are gel cell and not really practical for a solar power system.
2. Generators are not green! You would want your Generator to be your last choice. Grid power will be cheaper and cleaner than what you will get from a generator.
3. What about cooling. Ac sucks a HUGE amount of power. If you are someplace with a lot of sunshine odds are pretty good you will need a lot of cooling.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
The reason why laptop *appears* to have battery capacity gauges that don't like being left on A/C power for a couple of months is not the gauge, it is the battery.
Lithium Ion batteries works poorly in constant full charge conditions and in hot temperatures. Their effectiveness degrades in heat and constant full charge. And guess what? A constant plugged in laptop has BOTH! Heat from the computer and full charge all the time. So a laptop left plugged in for months will kill the battery fast with the heat it generates and the constant charge of the battery.
Read here: http://www.batteryuniversity.com/parttwo-34.htm
It takes alot of energy and resources to build a new WRT54G. (The amount of used energy cannot be deduced from its price, since we don't know which form of energy and at what price went into the production of said device.) Plus appliences use energy in operation as well. (upto 12W for the WRT54G according to the specs) The difference between the power consumption of a PC and of the appliance matters.
100 Watt 24/7 is furthermore pretty unrealistic for a PC in use as a router or music player. It would have to be extremely misconfigured or running seti@home to draw that much power.
My Linux based DVR draws less, even though it has an MPEG2 decoder and two DVB-s receiver cards and it doesn't run 24/7.
General purpose computers can be adapted to new needs, while you have to throw appliances away and buy a new one, as soon as one single new feature you need isn't supported. On top of that, PCs can do many things at the same time.
So at the end of the day, much speaks for reusing old stuff with Linux.
Who painted my computer this lime green color?!?!?!
...
No, I don't have a Lime or Emerald iMac.
I have no tag line
It's time to move the hard drives out of computers. We should create cheap fast easy to setup OS storage outside the computer so that we can remove those power & space hungry hard drives from the box. Bootable IP based block devices with small 'usb key' style local boot partitions seems like a reasonable way to make this happen. Linux is probably flexible enough to make this happen quickly but to work right network block devices should be fully integrated into the kernel. Windows might have more trouble.
/boot partition. I'd also like to see motherboard manufacturers integrating reasonably sized (128+ MB) permanently attached bootable USB keys onto motherboards.
Network block devices would allow the storage for many machines to be centralized and managed and it could be done in a much more cost effective and flexible way than SAN's allow. With gigabit ethernet, networks are now fast enough to make network based storage plenty fast for most applications and, with well designed centralized storage systems, they could be even faster than local storage.
i-scsi is promising but the cards are ridiculously expensive and you need a separate connection for storage and regular networking, something that won't be practical for widespread deployment to desktops, a place where network block devices would provide a huge benefit. A software mode i-scsi driver and the ability to bootstrap to the point where you could use it would probably cover things.
I'd like to see someone modify the Fedora installer to allow installation to network block device based root partitions using a bootable USB key as the
set softtabstop=4 shiftwidth=4 expandtab nocp worlddomination
Give me a break... I try to make a simpsons reference and you think its some kind of 9/11 flame attempt? Right. Next time I'll post an episode reference link just to make sure. *rolls eyes*
There's tons of literature on the subject, and probably ready-made systems, too. If you want to do something super-hardcore, build it into a computer power supply without using an inverter.
-mkb
Bicycle powered servers! Why not make the common user work for the I.T. for once! Hey! you want that file, start to pedal!
I'm well aware, considering that I've spec'd out 16kVA room-wide UPS's and the like. My original comment was a slightly sarcastic comment aimed at the original poster who was "pulling a Xerox" (aka confusing the company name with the type of equipment).
Please help metamoderate.
I'd basically build a swimming pool out of styro-create (concreate with styrofoam replacing the aggrigate). Then fill the pool with the densest large rocks I could get for cheap or free. Then construct a cover for the pool which would become part of the basement floor.
Expensive, but needed to recover a significant amount of the heat you're putting into it. You still won't be able to store heat much more then overnight.
Ground contact heat pumps use buried water lines for consistant temperature underground (they are used up north, but south of permafrost). Granted their lines are deliberately spread to keep them from cooling/heating the ground.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Has anyone actually considered the unthinkable thought in this day and age of the on demand world?
Shut them off...
I'd like to see some numbers on the amount of power and natural resources wasted because we all have to have computers up 7x24x365. Even if no one is actively using the resources or has a chance of using them. I'm sure these numbers would be both interesting and staggering. I'm sure that the US would be listed as the worst offender in this category as well.
Since Y2K, I've worked for 4 different companies.
All of these companies had some form of lights out time for a good portion of their computing assets. How much electricity are we wasting by just leaving our office desktop and server equipment on and available 7x24?
Could companies institute policies of once an asset is backed up in the evening that it powers down until just before the workday begins? This could be one of those instances where the phrase "every little bit helps" could be applied.
Obviously this would not be applicable for internet services like email or web, but if your Customer Services organization doesn't operate between 11pm and 8am, what's the point of the application hardware being operational beyond backing up the resource?
Does anyone have any thoughts along these lines?
"...the shortest distance between two points may be straight line, but it is by no means the most interesting."
The mini reminds me of a friend who used an old 68k macintosh as a webserver. her desktop was plugged into mains power but the little web server only used 17w of power to run all day every day, and was on a solar power setup with battery backup. last time I heard from her it had gone down from lack of power only twice in a year.
There's a hosting company that runs on solar power, Solar Host.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Solar power, wind genies, and alternative sources of power aren't cheap up front but over the long term they are cheaper. Depending on the system configuration a system can pay for itself in 7 years, thereafter power is "free". Some good websites are:
- Home Power
- Solar Today
- CREST
FalconShould there be a Law?
Also, its not as if I'm constantly rebuiling my system... on averge I do a complete rebuild every 6 months
You know, for some people every 6 months IS "constantly rebuilding".
Be generous, assume that panal makes 1 KWhour a day. Assume CA pricing that's $.14 per day. $51 per year. Won't cover interest on the $1K much less start to pay it off.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
I work as an "order taker" (for lack of a better term) for a vitamin company. Basically I sit in my little cubicle and read or play on my Gameboy until some customer interrupts me with a call. ;)
I connect to an AS400 to do my work. I look at a simple, text-only emulator all night long. Unless for some reason I need to use my email or play Freecell.
I have a Pentium 4 3.x(can't remember) with a 17 inch CRT monitor. You can feel the heat coming out the back of the tower and from the top of the monitor. I used to have a dumb terminal which worked fine. No Freecell though, that sucked.
There are HUNDREDS of stations exactly like mine. We do not shut off the computers OR monitors when we leave because... Um... Because they say not to.
This is just one company. Yay.
The biggest problem with going green/low power, particularly for servers is the motherboards (there are already good CPU and power supply choices out there). Manufacturers rarely provide power specs specifically for their motherboard's power draw, and so far as I have been able to determine there is no such thing as a server grade seriously low power motherboard (I've been looking for the last two years). Basically, manufacturers do not support either ECC or large amounts of RAM (preferably multi-gigabyte) on any board designed for low power use, and these are far more important than CPU horsepower (as is multiple ethernet connections). As someone who has been running an off grid internet server 24/7 for the last couple years, I have been forced to settle for one gigabyte of RAM in my latest server upgrade (tolerable) and no-ECC (really bad idea), but with a 30 watt total power budget, there is no other real choice in today's market.
1. Batteries suck. Flat out they are boxes of acid and lead. Read any of the solar energy magazines and you will find huge articles discussing battery safety.
Yeap, I read some of them, Home Power, Solar Today, Backwoodshome and Mother Earth News. Though there are problems with batteries they are getting better.2. Generators are not green! You would want your Generator to be your last choice. Grid power will be cheaper and cleaner than what you will get from a generator.
That's about the size of it, backup genies should be the last thing as long as ac is available. But there's a growing movement of people moving off the grid, and depending on how far powerlines would need to be run it could be cheaper to have a totally self sufficient power supply with a genie backup.
3. What about cooling. Ac sucks a HUGE amount of power. If you are someplace with a lot of sunshine odds are pretty good you will need a lot of cooling.
Passive solar design can help with heating and cooling as can other techniques.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Unfortunately, you could not run an active Gentoo system without at least about 1GB of space, given that the portage tree takes up about 700MB. Yes, I've tried.
I've spent the last 10 years trying to make a career as a low-power specialist. I've failed, because people don't care about power.
Laptop battery lifetime is abysmal. People rarely run their laptops off batteries. Trains and planes now have sockets where you can plug them in. Why don't people refuse to buy these awful things? Answer is that they care more about weight, performance, style and above all cost than about power efficiency.
In my masters thesis I wrote something like: "If things continue as they are, we will need to put fans in laptops. That is clearly ridiculous. Low-power processors are the way ahead". Look what happened.
In business, people don't care about the fact that the electricity to run their server will cost money. That comes out of someone else's budget. (Hint to corporate accountants: change that!).
Aircon costs also matter a great deal, depending on what part of the world you are in. But it's not only that: I read one study that worked out the labour costs of needing two technicians to lift things in and out of racks, when lower power versions (with lighter power supplies) could be moved by one person. I think that was in telecom applications (e.g. telephone exchanges). The economic benefits of low power are enormous.
Until recently, the greatest potential for power savings in silicon was with fine-grained shutdown. Processors and peripherals could be designed to efficiently shut down for very short periods when the system is idle. This might have halved power consumption for typical server and desktop applications.
Now, small geometry sillicon suffers from leakage, i.e. transistors that are "off" actually leak a significant current. It's this short-circuit current that now dominates power consumption. So shutdown would need to actually remove the power, rather than just stopping the clock. That's much harder to do.
My feeling is that the best way ahead is to minimise complexity. A chip with half as many transistors will have half the leakage. Luckily, smaller chips also cost less, so maybe we can produce "win win" products that consume less power AND cost less. Cost is, after all, the most important factor.
We must also strive to prevent software from requiring more and more resources.
APC makes the crapiest UPS on the planet. Junk.
And using a geothermal heat pump is significantly more efficient than using an atmospheric heat pump. The former pumps heat to and from the 50 degree Farenheit ground while the latter tries to pump heat into the hot air during the summer and get heat out of the air during the winter.
I didn't find anything referencing it online but a few years ago I read an article about how Pres Bush's ranch in Texas is heated and cooled via a geothermal heat pump.
FalconShould there be a Law?
I do not like them, Sam-I-Am.
Quidquid Latine dictum sit, altum videtur (anything said in Latin sounds important)
I think a server room that doubles as a Wine Cellar is a pretty green idea. Think of the potential... a free bottle of Cristal with every colo you purchase.
APC is also American Power Conversion who makes Uninterruptable Power Supplies, UPS's.
FalconShould there be a Law?
You dont put the portage tree on the machine.
You have a central portage tree mounted via NFS or AFS or whatever, and every machine in your network uses that.
This is a hosting company that claims green power, but actually just buys green tags (maybe, or so they say). They also just plug their servers into the wall like everyone else.
Meh.
I resemble this remark myelf
Same here, I'm on disability and haven't worked in years. I am in school though and hope to get a coop or internship soon.
FalconShould there be a Law?
I have a Pentium M ULV (ultra low voltage) 1GHz laptop (much faster than a 1GHz desktop, more like 1.6GHz) which is fantastic. It draws 10... count them 10W of power on average with the screen turned off. With screen on, it draws 14W. But I don't need the screen, because I have it connected to a 19" flat screen drawing another 30W.
So, with my external wireless keyboard and mouse included (with rechargeable batteries) I have a 19" desktop drawing just 40W of power.
Oh, and I use one of those little wallsocket things that tells me how many watts I'm drawing. That's how I know.
I leave it turned on 24-7. No need to turn it off at all.
And now, I'm going to use a neat little gizmo to turn my USB 2 port into a second VGA port, and then have another 18.1" monitor (which draws about 30 watts).
10+30+30 = 70 Watts total.
BTW, its the Acer Travelmate C111TCi.
You can't power an entire server farm with solar power,
Though I don't know how many servers they have there is a company that runs their webservers on solar, SolarHost.com. It's a matter of available space and how much you want to spend to configure a solar system.
Eventually green power will be cheaper than fossil fuel power, as green power prices are only falling and fossil fuels will only rise in price. At that point I think we'll start seeing a lot of businesses start to take a serious look at green power. Business as a whole will never be ecologically minded until it is more profitable to do so.
Quite a few businesses with more going into it are involved in not just solar power but other alternative energy sources. Heck I just googled "solar" and "power" and BP Solar got top ad placement. Then again BP Solar is one of the top solar panel makers. Because of the number of results I added "energy" and still got more than 28,000 results. Adding "electricity" returned almost 10,000.
FalconShould there be a Law?
The last time I checked, the electrical grid carries AC power. Edison was a DC man.
Coincidentally, I'd just sent the following letter to my webhost asking them to offer 'green' energy as an option.
5 6d308a378f53d3105ed002dfdf26d26
Basically, all they have to do is purchase 'green tags' to offset their electricity use. It's easy to set up, no need for windmills, facilities changes etc. It would be great if others sent the same suggestions to their hosting providers.
http://lunarforums.com/viewtopic.php?t=26288&sid=
dave
Most colos don't change what they charge customers based on their energy usage. Energy efficiency gains are therefore all downside for the customer (more expensive equipment, presumably) and all upside for the colo. Putting a power meter on each rack or cage would end that in a hurry.
Dog is my co-pilot.
To hell with Photovoltaics! Too much pollution. Let potatos (izzat spelt OK, Dan?) do the conversion from sunlight.
Then YOU convert the carbos to electricity and run your server(s) using POTATO POWER !
Anything less will pollute.
I assume the spud-power UPS will power something other than a Windows/IIS system...
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- aqk
F U
I had been using solar power since the 70s. My old Arco 55 watt panel is still working after some 25 years. I live in the desert and don't have conventional AC from a power company. So I have 4 Uni-Solar 64 watt panels now, charging 4 L2 batteries (currently 6 yrs old), which supply 12 volts to an AC inverter that I use to power my Laptop, refrigerator, LCD TV, and a few desktops. I use LED lights to light up my home. It's inexpensive, easy to use, no moving parts, just sits there and produces electric power. Done, end of story? What I am trying to say here is that "IF" solar electric power were invented today... with our energy industry in California such a mess and customers being held hostage by increasing rate hikes... and "IF" you heard about a new energy invention that you could buy and install yourself, that just sat there with no moving parts and could produced enough power to run your home and you wouldn't have to pay or depend on SCE again. What would you do? Now that's end of story! It works, it's here, use it
The old good server-client architecture can save a lot of CPU power and energy too. Also, thin clients are silent.
The key thing with anything built either public sector or private isn't how much a CPU burns or how the power usage is. It's about getting the managers in charge of the building design to REALIZE it's an issue. Our building barely had any buy in to IT or network reform let alone thinking about "Green Computing" and we're the a state version of the EPA!
If there is no buy-in or communication from management, you need to bust in and either diplomatically request to be included on the IT design aspects of the building or you will find yourself in a world of hurt when you move in.
Our server room was an afterthought! We had one 220 V outlet for for 10 servers. Were we permitted to purchase new blade servers to consolidate? No. Also there was no AC in the server room, let alone an energy efficient system. Also any modifications to use alternative energy is very expensive. Solar? Fagettaboutit! Wind? In a city? The best you can do is make sure you don't have generators that create new point sources for polution. (ie. no generator that starts putting out smoke or exhaust). Which puts you back on the power grid.
For you IT movers, shakers and decision makers out there. Get the buy in from management, otherwise your Green building turns from Environmental Pine Green to Monkey Puke Green.
Without buy-in the best you can do is to establish policies to have people turn of their monitors and shut down their PCs (unless you software push after hours) at the end of the day. But we all know how observant and steadfast users can be.
/end rant
Power consumption should have been addressed long time ago. The average 400 W per desktop PC is insane. Desktop PC should be using by now laptop technologies to lower power consumption. It would not only lead to considerable power savings it would also help laptop - and ultimately - less power hungry device development.