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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
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!
"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.
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?
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"?
I still have to wonder what the real point of virtualizing is. Yes, Microsoft pulled an amazing coup by convincing sysadmins that they should have a separate box for every tiny little service they wanted to run. But Microsoft got away with it because of the crappy design of Windows as a server OS. (i.e. You have to plan for complete system wipes and upgrades, security is such that one service could compromise another, and system software components are such that they happily interfere with each other.)
Back in the land of all things sane (i.e. Unix style OSes), I see no reason why NOT to run a billion services on one machine. As long as you've got spare system resources, why shouldn't you make use of them? Why do I NEED the domain controller, file server, mail server, and ftp server to all be different machines? One big Unix box does the job better, and for a lower up front (and longterm!) cost than lots of tiny Windows boxes!
Granted, there are still some issues that can't be overcome. But which really makes more sense, spending millions of dollars on tons of machines and an army of support staff, or spending a few hundred thousand on a couple of redundant machines and an admin or two to maintain them?
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
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.
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!
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.
My computers can make even a 250-watt powersupply catch fire (Panic and terror ensued, but the system survived)
They're all relatively green though, because I pay extra to my local utility to have them put enough power from wind farms onto the grid to power my home. It's a different solution perhaps, but everyone has different needs.
And I know what some of you want to say, so let me pre-empt you: Yes I know that my computers are powered by minced bird guts (B.S.) and weather pattern destruction (prove it)! Ha ha ha! I don't care. It's better than coal or gas or oil, so bite me, ok? Until direct solar energy becomes feasable, it's among the best solutions we've got.
Random and weird software I've written.
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?