Slashdot Mirror
Congress Passes Energy Efficient Server Initiative
Krishna Dagli writes to mention a News.com article about a just-passed Congressional initiative. On Wednesday the House passed legislation instructing Americans to make energy efficiency a priority when purchasing computer servers. From the article: "Washington politicians voted 417-4 on Wednesday to tell American purchasing managers that it's in their 'best interests' to pay attention to energy conservation. The bill, sponsored by Rep. Mike Rogers, a Michigan Republican, also directs the Environmental Protection Agency to conduct a three-month study 'of the growth trends associated with data centers and the utilization of servers in the federal government and private sector.'" Well, at least if they're doing this they're not passing 'real' laws, right?
A saavy hosting company can virtualize multiple machines into one physical box. The companies who can do this well enough so that their customers cannot tell the difference will operate more efficiently. Power isn't going to get cheaper, until we figure out how to stop burning what's left of our fossil fuels.
it's a blue bright blue Saturday hey hey
You know how much it costs to keep a computer running 24/7? If you look into it, you'll see it's usually at least a couple hundred dollars a year (if not more depending on energy cost, peripherals, and stuff like that.) Yeah, you have a huge server case, and penis envy might make you want to pop in a huge 600W power supply with a huge power-hungry CPU, and lots of high end and extra stuff that you don't actually need. I recall harddrives, as the main part of most home servers, do not take too much power (a couple dozen Watts i think). I used to leave my desktop on all the time and let it act as my file server, but am now using an older computer with a 250W power supply and a minimialist configuration, and let my desktop suspend to ram most of the time. Yeah, some may need that 600W for a home server if it's acting as a mythtv server/web server/media reencoding server, but most probably do not.
In undeveloped countries, the consumer controls the market. In capitalist America, the market controls you.
Maybe someone should try telling Americans the same thing about cars. To paraphrase the legislation "give high priority to energy efficiency as a factor in determining best value and performance for purchases of cars."
This was my first thought when reading this summary. Then I thought. It's really pointless all together because those buy computer rooms worth of computer already look at energy efficiency! O.k. the way that they do it generally is how much A/C is required and what is the cost in electrity to run them all. The more efficient a computer the less A/C and power than you need.
Reading your post, I thought of why not a 1% power reduction across the board on all products per year until industries run into actual real hard limits for reducing power consumation. 1% doesn't sound like much, but over time it would add up, plus it would be a good mindset to get our engineers into thinking about.
Actually, it seems fuel efficiency hurts the govt. coffers. Less fuel produced and consumed...less taxes collected on it.
We've already seen this happening in the western states like CA, and Oregon. Lots of people using less gasoline...and now the states are trying to come up with imaginative new ways to collect lost tax revenue to keep the roads up...like the trials of cars that had computers and GPS systems that tracked the miles you traveled in the state (and God knows what other information, like if you were speeding any)...and would report this to the state at the gas station or maybe annual tag renewals..and you got charge on that data.
If you wanted to see a sharp drop in gas prices...get the fed and state taxes lifted for a day..and see what the price would really be.
No...the govt gets a LOT of revenue on fuel production and consumption.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........