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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 #!
"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?
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?
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