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Move to a Mainframe, Earn Carbon Credits
BBCWatcher writes "As Slashdot reported previously, Congress is pushing the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to develop energy efficiency measures for data centers, especially servers. But IBM is impatient: Computerworld notes IBM has signed up Neuwing Energy Ventures, a company trading in energy efficiency certificates, in a first for "green" computing. Now if your company consolidates, say, X86 servers onto an IBM mainframe on top of slashing about 85% off your electric bill each megawatt-hour saved earns one certificate. Then you can sell the certificates in emerging carbon trading markets. IBM's own consolidation project (collapsing 3,900 distributed servers onto 30 mainframes) will net certificates worth between $300K and $1M, depending on carbon's market price. Will ubiquitous carbon trading discourage energy-inefficient, distributed-style infrastructure in favor of highly virtualized and I/O-savvy environments, particularly mainframes?"
It's the global-warming equivalent of saying your Hail Marys.
...and reducing the amount of pollution we spew into the atmosphere is beneficial to us and to the environment, global-warming boogeyman or not.
Peak oil is going to do the job instead.
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As long as conventional energy sources like coal & coil continue to be subsidized by our tax dollars alternative energy sources will face an up hill battle. Then when those new energy sources finally can compete with the old ones and the old ones start to rise in cost why would the new ones not rise also (if remaining just lower in cost). Isn't that what capitalism is all about?
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
At the moment there is no permission required to pollute, you could pump as much CO2 into the air as you like. Well, instead of that the government says:
1: You need permission to pollute.
2: You get those permissions from the carbon credit markets.
3: You have to buy them at whatever they cost in that market every year.
4: You can sell permissions if you have more than you need.
Then the government auctions enough credits to represent a slight reduction in the overall production in CO2. Each credit might represent one tonne of CO2. Then each year the government reduces the numbers of credits available in the market. The cost of a credit then increases simply due to the reduction in supply or the increase in demand.
As the cost of emitting the CO2 increases, companies will switch to alternative solutions, choosing whichever they like best.
Of course, this only works if politicians aren't completely corrupt or utter morons, as seems largely to be the case. In that case they might give companies credits and allow them to sell them on the markets, it's basically free money to those companies which receive the credits.
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People in the USA tend to drive massive, fuel-hungry cars and fly planes a lot, which looks bad.
Ok, ok, I'm kidding. Everyone in the US (kids too) drives a hummer and has a C-130 that they bring it onto so they can fly it cross-country. The BBC told me so.
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As a general rule, if you're building a business computer and want to save as much as electricity as possible, the most highly virtualized (and virtualizable) platform wins. So attributes like massive caches and screaming I/O help enormously. (I think there was a Stanford study recently that figured this out.) Thus it's no surprise a modern mainframe is more energy efficient than anything else.
But in the Computerworld article referenced in the original story, IBM says the carbon program will also be available for its System p servers at some point in the future. My prediction is that you'll typically get fewer certificates if you move to System p versus System z, but it's likely businesses will do some of both depending on what sort of applications they're rehosting. There are some types of applications that will do better on System p, and there is some software that runs on AIX that doesn't run on z/OS or Linux.
Regarding SPARC it's impossible to say since Sun hasn't entered into any carbon credit auditing system yet. The IBM-Neuwing program is a first. However, my prediction is that you'll get even fewer certificates if you consolidate to SPARC. I say that simply because I assume IBM is acting in its own self-interest, and I'm sure they think the energy efficiency fight is one they can win against other vendors. In this case self-interest and environmentalism coincide. For any of these platforms, though, businesses will figure out whether the certificates favor certain platforms over others, and they'll do that application by application (or application function by application function). And many other factors will go into the decision as well, although most of those factors pull in the same direction as energy efficiency, such as software charges. One could even imagine that before long server vendors lagging in the energy efficiency department will start bundling carbon certificates with their servers in order to compete. Thus IBM adopting this program is a smart way to respond to an untapped market need and to raise the effective price of competing servers compared to IBM's. Very smart move.
By the way, the world has totally flipped on its head, and it would be extremely misleading to say an IBM mainframe is "proprietary" and X86 (for example) isn't. What does proprietary mean? You can run pure 100% GPL Linux on an IBM mainframe -- Debian, Slackware, CentOS, etc. -- and you don't even need a closed source driver as you usually need for X86 servers. IBM publishes extreme instruction-level detail in a free book called Principles of Operation, and it's so detailed and thorough that the open source community created an implementation of the instruction set called Hercules that actually works compared to still imperfect efforts like Bochs and QEMU. (Although IBM may assert patent claims on its processor architecture.) One company is porting OpenSolaris to System z, and they didn't even have to ring up IBM. In comparison, Intel and AMD also may assert patent claims, and AMD is suing Intel for alleged monopolistic behavior. Neither Intel nor AMD publish PoO-type documents (to that level of detail). Then there's Microsoft Windows, and it's hard to think of any more proprietary OS than that.
Also, IBM changed the way it charges for z/OS software about 7 years ago. Now almost everything is charged by the amount you actually use, something IBM calls Variable Workload License Charge (VWLC). If you run a little bit of DB2 in one LPAR (partition) but a lot of IMS in another, then you pay a little for DB2 and more for IMS. You also control exactly what you consume using something called softcaps, and you can set those either per-LPAR or for a group of LPARs. One interesting little twist to mainframe subcapacity licensing is that, if you need a little bit of WebSphere (and a lot of other IBM products), the lowest entry price (smallest license you can order) is for z/OS. You can order as little as 1 "Value Uni
At the bottom it says "But overall, US adults have the biggest annual travel carbon footprint in the world at 7.8 tonnes, more than double France's 3.7 tonnes, which comes in at number two. Third on the list, at 3.1 tonnes, is Britain." -- the USA is a big jump ahead of France there!
For instance, "If one in 10 Americans used public transportation regularly, U.S. reliance on foreign oil could be cut by more than 40 percent--the amount we import from Saudi Arabia each year." (source). This notes that public transport use in America has now got back to the level it was at 50 years ago -- I don't know how much settlement density has changed in that time, maybe people have left cities a lot (?), but if it used to be possible, why isn't it possible any more?
I'd be surprised if 1 in ten Americans (30 million people) weren't using public transportation regularly. In NYC, it's a much larger hassle to have a car (fees, tolls, paying for parking, etc) than it is to take the subway. The same is true of nearly every city I've been to in the eastern half of the US (Seattle being the only city I've been to on the west coast and that was either walking or driving around with my girlfriend so I didn't check out their public transportation).
Outside of the cities (ie the vast majority of the US), public transportation just isn't possible. I live in a town of 7000 people with about 100 miles of road. We have a grocery store in town but I need to go 15 miles (one way) to get a decent selection of food at a reasonable price (a large national chain and another regional chain), to buy clothes, etc. I need to go 25 miles in another direction to get to specialty stores. It's not economically feasible to build a million little stores to service a couple dozen people each. It's also not feasible to expect people to walk up to 5 miles just to get to a public transportation station that will zip them off to those locations once an hour (damn, you missed it by 5 minutes and now have to wait almost an hour). Oh, double the buses, trains or whatever? Ok, you just doubled the carbon output (and costs) and halved the ridership of each transport. You certaintly can't solve the problem of distance to the station by running more transports around to pick people up (they'll be empty most of the time and will end up creating more carbon emissions than cars. For reference, it costs about $400k a year (not counting acquisition of new buses) to bus our kids to/from school on predetermined routes twice a day). The vast majority of the country (excluding dense, urban areas) is even far less dense than my town (190 people/mi^2 or 73.5/km2). I've been places where the distance to the nearest neighbor is measured in miles.
Finally, only half of the oil used by the United States goes to create gasoline. A quarter of it alone goes to home heating and most of the rest is used for farming and industrial purposes. If gasoline makes up 50% of our oil useage and 10% of Americans using public transportation means cutting oil consumption by 40%, that means that we'll see a 80% reduction in gasoline useage from a 10% increase in transportation. Why, at that rate, if we get 50% of people to use mass transportation, we'll not only stop using gasoline entirely, why we'll be creating 4 times more gasoline out of thin air than we consumed beforehand. Without looking at it, I'd say their numbers are flawed (or highly skewed to consider the 10% only those who use the most gasoline).
Why does the US use so much gas to get around? Again, it's a big place with a low density so mass transportation just can't work. People like having the freedom of getting in their car and going somewhere on their schedule rather than when some department of transportation decides they can move from point A to point B (and you're screwed if you miss the last ride of the night because you had to work late... it's not a matter of walking a mile pissing and moaning about your luck, you might be walking 50 miles or paying out the ass for a
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