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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?"
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?
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 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.
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
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
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.
I think you've hit the issue right on the head. Your average data-center manager could not care less about whether his server farm is environmentally friendly or not. On the other hand, electricity is a major expense. A dozen racks of 1U servers pulling 100-200 watts each will probably run you upwards of $80k/year. And that doesn't even include the cost of cooling your server room (which will add another $20k or so). Server consolidations and energy efficient servers save money. And that will always be your driving force. If company A says they have a "green" server room, it's just marketing. Their first concern and only concern is the bottom line.
:)
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.
bance.net
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.
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).
"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.
That's why many sites are virtually hosted on a single, more powerful box. It is usually much cheaper to simply buy a newer, more powerful box than to pay the maintenance costs associated with an older server that your vendor may no longer support.
...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.
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.
Wow I wish I could get the Karma for this but..... I work for solardatacenters (solarhost), and all the servers are powered by 'renewable engery' which means that they are plugged into the wall just like every other server farm. It just happens that the local utility uses hydro-power, which is re-newable. *cough*scam*cough*
Their first concern and only concern is the bottom line. While we can argue the short-sightedness of this perspective all we want (and it is tremendously short-sighted to allow companies to pass on environmental costs to society), the truth is that we will win if we start impacting the bottom line of companies. It's possible, and getting more possible every day.
> 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. :)
Electricity is a much more valuable energy than heat from a thermodynamic viewpoint. That means that it is not very efficient to use electricity for heating buildings. Sure, you will get a bit energy back from the waste heat of the computers, but probably this is at least 2-3 times less efficient than generating the heat directly at the required temperature.
Also, you get that side effect only in the winter months, in the summer you might have to put additional energy into the air-conditioning.