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Building the Green Data Center

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the bang-for-the-buck dept.

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."

5 of 86 comments (clear)

  1. Lean Code = Green Code by BigZaphod · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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!

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    Hexy - a strategy game for iPhone/iPod Touch
  2. He's missing real world experience by afidel · · Score: 4, Informative

    He talks about turning off unused capacity like it's some future panacea, HP and VMWare have been doing it for a couple years already. He also dismisses turning servers off as not being a big deal but anyone who's run a datacenter knows that servers that have been running for years often fail when they are shut off. There are numerous physical reason for this from inrush current to bearing wear. A modern boot from SAN server is probably much less likely to fail at boot then older ones with DAS, but the chance is very much non-zero. Of course with a good dynamic provisioning system a single host failure doesn't matter because that new VM will just get spun up on a different host that's woken up.

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    There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
  3. Managed power distribution units by Colin+Smith · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

     

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    Deleted
  4. Four steps to a green data center by harry666t · · Score: 4, Funny

    1. Get a data center
    2. Paint it green
    3. ???
    4. Cthulhu

  5. Good info sources on Green Data Centers by 1sockchuck · · Score: 3, Informative

    This is a huge topic, since so many different strategies are being brought to bear. For data center operators, energy efficiency is a business imperative since the power bills are soaring. Here are some sources offering ongoing reading about Green Data Centers:

    The Green Data Center Blog
    Data Center Knowledge
    Groves Green IT
    The Big List of Green Technology Blogs