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Green buildings, Green Server Farms?

Posted by timothy on from the but-biogas-is-wind-energy dept.

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?"

2 of 263 comments (clear)

  1. Considering mac mini's take less power than cpus by guildsolutions · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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?

  2. Virtualization is the answer by gtrubetskoy · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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. :-)