Building the Green Data Center

blackbearnh writes "O'Reilly News talked to Bill Coleman, former founder of BEA and current founder and CEO of Cassett Corporation, about the challenges involved in building more energy-efficient data centers. Coleman's company is trying to change the way resources in the data center are used, by more efficiently leveraging virtualization to utilize servers to a higher degree. In the interview, Coleman touches on this topic, but spends most of his time discussing how modern data centers grossly overcool and overdeploy hardware, leading to abysmal levels of efficiency."

Comments

Lean Code = Green Code

[BigZaphod]

Software has an impact, too. Messy, heavy code takes longer to run, takes more CPUs, etc. Imagine how much energy could be saved if there wasn't so much code bloat!

Managed power distribution units

[Colin Smith]

Switch the machines off at the the socket. You can do it using SNMP.
Monitor the average load on your machines, if too low, migrate everything off it and switch a machine off. If too high, switch one on.

Course it assumes you know how to create highly available load balanced clusters. Automatic installations, network booting and all that. Not so difficult.