Slashdot Mirror
IT Vs. the Permanent Energy Crisis
snydeq writes "Organizations looking to remain profitable in the face of escalating energy costs may lean even harder on IT to achieve energy efficiencies in the years to come, InfoWorld reports. But instead of limiting IT's efficiency role to the datacenter, companies will tap IT's vast knowledge of company networks, equipment, and work processes to uncover efficiencies across the organization, in some cases tipping facilities management into IT. 'There is a lot IT can do to fix its own 2 percent [of the company's carbon emissions] and make it more efficient, but the big opportunity for IT is to take a leadership role in tackling that other 98 percent across the business,' says one analyst. And by taking charge of the organization's energy strategy now, IT will be in prime position to alter its relationship with management and reap benefits in the boardroom in the years ahead, analysts contend."
Go back to the abacus. Computers are overrated. Penthouse can take over the only other computer function.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
"IT will be in prime position to alter its relationship with management and reap benefits in the boardroom in the years ahead, analysts contend."
Ahh, more responsibility, additional liability, same pay scale.
Better known as 318230.
Using conservation to reduce carbon emissions assumes a carbon based power source. Why not take all the brain power you are going to throw at conservation and throw it into developing wind, solar, and nuclear as power sources?
Quite seriously - run some optical tube skylights (like this, they come in a wide variety of options) into your working areas. FAR too many companies are wasting energy powering internal lighting when the sun's out. You can always turn on the lights *if* you need them due to a storm.
As an added bonus, you'll start to eliminate health problems - daytime-constant lighting has been proven to mess with your internal cycles and messes up peoples' sleeping patterns, a large part of why sleep disorders are so prevalent in developed countries.
Those articles read like market-speak on toilet paper. At least if it had been printed on a roll, it might have been of use.
"There is a lot IT can do to fix its own 2 percent [of the company's carbon emissions] and make it more efficient"
What about IT's methane emissions? There are alot of pizza-eating, Diet Coke-drinking techies maintaining your servers. If that energy could be harnessed (instead of lighting them off through your jeans), a company's energy costs would be significantly decreased.
Attention all planets of the Solar Federation! We have assumed control! - Neil Peart
Why is it that the same people wanting IT to be green are the same people that want IT to deliver 5 9's, as well as complete security for anything that could possibly violate the integrity of the personal information that they submit on an inter/intranet? The server and it's software either has to work, or else chaos will move in and take over - what happened to bitching at the hardware manufacturers for their shortfall? Why should hardware and software work less than the brave and pioneering IT's that we have all come to know and love? (and trust with our deepest secrets).
Some people are only alive because it's against the law for me to hunt them down and kill them.
The solution is obvious, simply outsource all the work and fire the IT employees. This will give you massive savings, make the few domestic employees more reliable, and give you super management powers that will make you invincible.
"Most people, I think, don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?"
Well, until recently I ran the IT department for a manufacturer and I'd say bad, bad idea. The company is currently in the process of building a new facility with in a combined office/factory building. I must say, sure, the computers and computer cooling equipment might take upwards of 15% of the electricity of the new building, but cranes, welders, plasma tables, galvinization equipment, etc. that is required for us to build our product isn't just going to magically take less electricity just because we want it to. IT can take less electricity today due to increases in computing power, efficiency, etc. These have been demand driven because of the operating costs, but when you buy a welding machine you look at its functionality, not its electricity cost. Unless the cost of electricity climbs beyond $50,000 a month for a small shop such as ours you won't be seeing any demand for more efficient tools. Demand is what gave us more efficient IT equipment, and it will be the same for other equipment. When that happens the various departments such as welding, fabrication, etc. will still be designing their new work spaces, just with a mandate to purchase efficient equipment whenever possible. The IT department won't be planning many factories any time soon.
><));>
Surely the largest energy gains would come from telecommuting.
I submit that the shift to telecommuting will look less like the current employee group working out of their home, and more like companies increasing relying on "outsourcing", and out-sorcerers increasingly consisting of people who work in low-marginal-energy environments - whether their own college dorm, some un-cooled sweatshop in Thailand.
It bears mentioning that working from home reduces the AC energy for life-work by 50% while reducing the transportation energy by 80%. It also reduced healthcare costs by reducing viral exposures.
I think Beowulf clusters might be uncalled for here.
Yes, fundamental changes in how IT is run will bring changes.
Telecommuting
Lighting changes (as mentioned)
Changing current infrastructure out for energy efficient stuff (also mentioned)
Improved cooling systems (mentioned)
Better power distribution - less point of load conversions
Unified cooling schemes throughout the data center as well as tweak and improve existing schemes. Underfloor cabling blocking forced air system balancing etc.
There are parts of the world where underground heat exchangers could reduce the over-all cost of standard A/C systems - but that means investment.
Compartmentalized data center "closets" - reduce power and cooling needs
Upgrade older equipment for newer, cheaper, more capable hardware
As can be seen, nearly all of this comes with investment costs up front. That will not happen without some form of incentive. Spend short term money to save money in the long run doesn't look good on a quarterly report. When Wall Street or Washington are on the bandwagon and supporting or giving incentives... then it will begin to happen. In the mean time, look for more data breaches, service losses, and general poor performance from companies who continue to squeeze IT budget and demand less expense from them.
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
Ever see Jurassic Park?
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
Actually, it was mentioned in TFA that having someone remote work doesn't reduce the energy load @ the office unless the office is smart enough to shut down the extra heating/cooling/lighting. Thus the discussion about tying LDAP logins to the heating/cooling/lighting system. When the last person logs out, shut down the AC/Heating, and 10 minutes later have the lights go out - that type of automation is the heart of using IT & it's many tendrils to help reduce corporate energy consumption.
Of course I think that getting people to listen to IT when they say something is overkill would be nice too. I've seen too many high end PC's doing nothing but lightweight WP & Email to think that there isn't substantial savings there. I know of at least 2 quad core systems w/ high end graphics cards that have never done anything harder than open up a webpage.
Yes, that's like 12 kWh per week! Why, at 10c/kWh, that would be almost $5 per month.
And most cheap ass computers come with power supplies at 300W peak, but the average draw is closer to 100W. For an average small LCD panel it's around 50-100W. So you're looking at 150-200W of draw, not 300W. That's if they're not using a laptop, which would be probably around 20W.
But that's beside the point, because even if your employees are working from home, you still need to be running your servers. Having remote workers does save on travel time and gas usage though.
>You know, it is in fact possible to survive in most parts of the world without air conditioning.
Yes, of course, but if you want me to exchange my time in order for you to take advantage of my skilled labor, I shall do much more than merely "survive."
This is not negotiable.
I can "subsist" without making myself part of your corporate enterprise, get it?
If I work for you, I'm doing it for the rewards, and I have no shame in asking for the money.
On the other hand, when I've worked in IT I haven't had the problems that are so often reported by people who seem to do nothing but suffer.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
Most cheap ass computers comes with power supplies going at full capacity + cheap screens will likely send your power usage above the 300W, doing that 8 hours a day from home is far from negligible.
You'll find that most computers draw about 100W while working, and displays generally power down to 5W or less when left alone. Don't believe me? use killawatt or an ammeter and check it out yourself.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
The only IT issue here, is how to roll out patches/updates - but any IT manager with a grain of talent can sort that out.
You say that as if IT managers with a grain of talent are commonplace.
Worse, your employer may not pay you for the extra power you use - most won't even consider it.
Stack the additional power you use up against the money you save in fuel and vehicle wear and I'll bet telecommuting comes out ahead for the vast majority of people. Not to mention the time you save.
Plus, you're effectively giving your employer a cube-sized chuck of your house for free, try asking them for rent and I could hear them laughing at you from here!
Most people can move 30 miles further from the office and get 50% more house for the same money.
Even if you don't move, I for one am more than happy to trade a little space in my house* for the flexibility that comes from working at home. I see my kids when they get home from school, and I can pop down to the school whenever there's a program or whatever.
* In the interest of full disclosure, I don't have to give up any space in my house. I like having a den/office, so I'd set that space apart anyway. This way I just use it more, and I've gotten my employer to spring for a better chair, a better phone, etc.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
I think it comes down to stop wasting time and money on the conservation of energy and start making more of it, lots more of it. Nuclear power is the only currently viable method that does not significantly contribute to global warming etc etc etc. If we start making lots of electricity and make it cheap everything else will come to use it. Oil was cheap for a long time that's why we used it for energy. Show me 1 cent a kwh electricity and you can bet everybody with switch.
No sir I dont like it.
You know what else? Many of those people die.
I was watching a History Channel miniseries on the American Revolution the other day, and I was surprised to learn that one of the revolution's greatest Generals Nathanael Greene, died of a heat stroke. But not on the battlefield as one might expect. (Especially during the searing heat of Clinton's retreat from Philadelphia.) He died on his own plantation of a heat stroke.
What I'm getting at is that you should be careful about considering AC a luxury. It may make life more comfortable, but it also saves lives. One only needs to go as far as a major city to find reports of deaths every year from low income people who have no AC.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
You are correct that the heat is not a waste product and should be dealt with accordingly. I've re-ducted the 'waste' heat from our company's servers to help heat the rest of our building during most of the year.
Here's an article I wrote about the effort: http://www.djc.com/news/en/11202007.html
Next week, the EPA is even giving us a national award for the effort.
Just exactly is information technology energy inefficient?
Is it through the use of thousands of PCs in a large corporation each using 400+ watts of power (PC and CRT combined)? Switch to laptops and large screen LCD monitors.
Is it because the output of the IT department isn't doing enough to reduce the overall company energy bill? Well, yes, the purpose of the IT department is to look for ways to reduce bottlenecks in the production process. Which means that it looks for ways to speed up production, which means using more energy.
Maybe they're trying to say that the IT department is using too much energy driving to work and they should just all stay home and work in their pajamas from their kitchen tables. Hell, maybe the IT department simply drinks too much coffee.
Sure they can order the IT department to tweak and focus and get their energy consumption down. After a whole year, the IT department just might save enough energy to match one trip in the corporate jet carrying a couple executives across the continent for the purpose of getting drunk with another couple of executives from another company. Nothing like real 'face time' when you need to close the big deal.
Let's face it. Everything that American management says is basically full of shit. Sometimes they actually know it and must say it anyway. Usually they don't. For that matter, much management statements from any country are BS. But the Americans are the world-masters at total corporate double-think and nonsense.
Dilbertize them and ignore them. In twenty years the smart managers will be still around and the vast majority of dumb ones will be most likely be dead. Simply because they don't know what to do to keep themselves alive and no one's going to go out of their way to see that they survive. You should survive, though. And don't be concerned about being green.
You can't be lean, mean, serene, and green all at the same time.
Actually, if I understand the summary right, it says more like: well, we IT guys will teach the rest of the company too to be greener and more efficient and do more with less! And they'll listen to us! 'Cause we're smart and high-tech like that! And we have computers too!
Which, honestly, sounds to me like someone's wishful thinking and delusions of grandeur.
1. If IT is only 2% of a company's expenses, then they probably have some other stuff there which involves physics or chemistry. Like, you know, melting some steel, putting some serious amps through molten bauxite, or some tanks where all sorts of chemistry happens at high pressures and temperatures.
1.A. A lot of that is _hard_ to make more energy efficient. You can't, for example just cover a steel plant in thick thermal insulation, because then the air inside would reach a thousand degrees withing seconds. Or you can't melt steel with half the energy, because honestly there are some physical constants of the universe you'd need to change. Not saying it's impossible to come up with something better, but it isn't trivial stuff either. Partially because...
1.B. They do that already. Don't imagine that there isn't already a strong economic incentive to reduce your costs. In fact, it's the #1 thing you can promise, to get Wall Street to like you more. There are some smart engineers out there working on just that kind of stuff already.
1.C. Let's not kid ourselves, we may be smart guys and gals, but nobody knows _everything_. The idea that some guy sitting at the computer all day would also know enough to optimize an assembly line or cracking tower, just like that, if only someone would listen to him, are close to nil. It's a different domain. Chances are you, or your IT coleagues don't even know what that assembly line is like and how it works. You'd need to put years into just understanding that, and the science behind it, and, frankly, there are people more qualified than you there. We still _do_ produce other flavours of engineers, you know?
2. Well, I can't see many upper-level managers changing their processes just because the IT guy said so. Even _if_ the IT guy happens to be right. In a lot of places they're so caught up in their power games, and showing who's more important than who, that... well, to say the least, what makes you think they'd just give _you_ some of their power? Or better yet, give you power over them? Heh. Dream on.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Here in Japan (which is only an Asian country when it wants to be and, most of the time, it doesn't), they teach kids to do mathematics by visualizing a calculator. Its only in Asian-all-the-time-countries like Thailand where you're too poor to afford a good imaginary calculator that you need to revert to the old imaginary abacus.
And if you think Japan is advanced, I hear eight year olds in the US are starting to do imaginary Google searches on their imaginary Wikipedia... creating the fastest lookup of worthless trivia about Matter-Eater Lad ever seen in the history of the human race. [needs citation: OK, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matter-Eater_Lad , there, are you happy?]
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
It helps them to visualize numbers and visualize the processes of arithmetic. Probably an education emphasizing the use of wetware a little more would lead to the creation of more visionaries in the 'Westen World'. Yes, I know, old stuff (Computer Power and Human Reason by Joseph Weizenbaum, 1976). CC.
Not so much. Take young Gauss. Instead of using crazy number crunching skills to add all the integers between 1 and 100, he visualized doubling and reversing the list, noticing that this equals 100(101), coming up with the formula n(n+1)/2 for finding integer sums.
So which has more vision? Crunching numbers, or finding an ingenius shortcut? Seriously, who would have thought of that? Certainly not somebody whose greatest skill was with the abacus. In fact, his daughter famously said that he could only count to 4, "after that came n." Gauss was the greatest mathematician in his era (and some consider him the greatest of all time), and he probably never used (or needed) an abacus. Point is, being a human calculator will give you no more added vision than, well, a calculator.
Disclaimer: This anecdote on young Gauss is mostly apocryphal, though it is widely believed to be true in the mathematical and historical community (although his daughter's quote comes from reliable sources). Opinions may vary.
My preferred name is frazz, but someone keeps taking it. If you see him, tell him I said hi.