10 IT Power-Saving Myths Debunked

snydeq writes "InfoWorld examines 10 power-saving assumptions IT has been operating under in its quest to rein in energy costs vs. the permanent energy crisis. Under scrutiny, most such assumptions wither. From true CPU efficiency, to the life span effect of power-down frequency on servers, to SSD power consumption, to switching to DC in the datacenter, get the facts before setting your IT energy strategy."

Comments

I dunno..

[Anrego]

I'm of the school that thinks "debunking" involves some kind of comprehensive stats or numbers or evidence weight against strongly held opinions.

This article is basically a verbose version of the "nuh uh" argument.

It's not a bad article.. but I would hardly call this "debunking".

And I totally disagree on point #2 .. maybe having _all_ your extra servers always on is bad.. but if load peaks there is no _way_ someone should be waiting while a system boots.

Re:I dunno..

[Nursie]

That depends if your system has been tuned to boot in 5 seconds.

Or if it can return from suspend-to-ram nice and quick.

Re:I dunno..

[Anonymous Coward]

If you're booting those servers diskless with PXE and NFS, the boot time should be negligible. I should imagine the trick would also be to bring additional resources online before you are the point that you must tell users to wait while the server boots. The magic would be in predicting near-term future use...

Re:I dunno..

[gnick]

FTA:

Hibernate mode in XP saves the state of the system to RAM and then maintains the RAM image even though the rest of the system is powered down.

They must be using a different version of XP than I am... When I 'Hibernate' my laptop, it dumps the RAM to a file on the hard drive and then powers off completely. When I 'Stand By' my system, it keeps everything in RAM.

Maybe they have SP4...

Re:I dunno..

[ShieldW0lf]

I've got electric heat, and I've got a pile of servers in my spare bedroom, and I never need to turn on the electric heat, because the servers heat my home.

Which looks to me like an opportunity. People pay for heat. So, put the servers where people need heat, and suddenly a liability is a resource.

Apartment buildings, office buildings and malls in cold climates should all be prime locations for a datacenter.

Re:I dunno..

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

That depends if your system has been tuned to boot in 5 seconds.

Or if it can return from suspend-to-ram nice and quick.

Actually it doesn't. When you're in an HA environment, that means /being/ HA - there must be /no/ wait time while a machine starts (even if it's only a couple of seconds).

Re:I dunno..

[Nursie]

Think past "HA" for a second.

Think about metrics, predictable traffic and planned capacity.

Think about bringing a percentage of spare capacity online at any one time, in line with predicted peak traffic, and more as the load increases on what's there already.

HA can still be HA without needing everything on all the time.

(also, why the hell was my last post modded down as redundant?)

Re:I dunno..

[snowraver1]

If you are using electric heat, chances are you don't live in a cold climate and pay for air conditioning for much of the year negating any "savings". Here in cold-balls Canada, EVERYONE has centeral heating; it's too expensive to use electricity. That being said, I do agree that datacenters' heat should be used to heat useful things (office bldgs, like you suggest).

Re:I dunno..

[R2.0]

I stopped reading at #1: "Fact: The same electrical components that are used in IT equipment are used in complex devices that are routinely subjected to power cycles and temperature extremes, such as factory-floor automation, medical devices, and your car."

Well, yes, except for the fact that the it's a total lie. Cars, factory automation, and medical devises most certainly do NOT use "the same" components. While they may do the same things, and even be functionally equivalent, they are rated to much higher temperature and stress levels than consumer or even server grade components. Just ask the folks who have been trying to install "in-car" PC's with consumer grade components.

Re:I dunno..

[Aliencow]

Well I live in Canada, and most people I know use electric heating. Yes, central electric heating is great, and actually cheaper than oil around here. (Montreal area)

Re:I dunno..

[halcyon1234]

hey must be using a different version of XP than I am... When I 'Hibernate' my laptop, it dumps the RAM to a file on the hard drive and then powers off completely.

You must be using a different version of XP than I am... When I 'Hibernate' my laptop, it attempts to dump the RAM to a file, throws a hissy fit like a coddled freshman after their first exam, fails miserably, flickers the screen, disables the Hibernate option, and then just sits around until the battery drains.

Re:I dunno..

[cparker15]

(also, why the hell was my last post modded down as redundant?)

Probably because a similar point was already made in TFA:

You can also select systems that cold-boot rapidly. Model to model and brand to brand, servers exhibit wide variances in power-up delay. This metric isn't usually measured, but it becomes relevant when you control power consumption by switching off system power. It needn't take long. Servers or blades that boot from a snapshot, a copy of RAM loaded from disk or a SAN can go from power-down mode to work-ready in less than a minute. The most efficient members of a reserve/disaster farm can quiesce in a suspend-to-RAM state rather than be powered down fully so that wake-up does not require BIOS self-test or device querying and cataloging, two major sources of boot delay.

Re:I dunno..

[Vagnaard]

I don't know from where in Canada you are but no one I know in Montreal has central heating. Even in big apartment buildings. Everybody use that expensive electric heating. Maybe that's because electricity is cheap in Quebec...

Re:I dunno..

[camperdave]

I have no control over the heating in my apartment. Thus, I have to have an air conditioner running 24/7/365 because my room gets too hot from the two computers I have running... and they're both sub gigahertz machines. Heaven help me if I upgrade to a real machine.

Re:I dunno..

[greenzrx]

back in the very early 90's We moved into the first 7 world trade center. There was no heat in that building, it was air conditioned 365 days a year. People and computers heated all the floors. Unoccupied floors were damn cold in winter, i can tell you.

Re:I dunno..

[zippthorne]

Which thereby "debunks" point one: the power-on statistics obtained in a cold boot will not be present if they are not run in a hibernate-power-up. But the effects will still be there, if any, because the temperature still cycles.

Re:I dunno..

[sorak]

For a Web site, put up a static page asking users to wait while additional resources are brought online.

We're sorry for the inconvenience, but our systems seem to have been shut down. We've asked leroy, rufus, and heraldo to hit the power button, and we assure you that, once they've found that button, they will push it, and then, once the mandatory scandisk operation has completed, the Windows server screen will appear, and once the kernel operations have completed, the services you have requested will be available.

And that will be awesome!

While you're waiting, here are some links to our competitors' sites. Remember to open them in a new tab, so you can occasionally come back and hit "refresh". We promise, we're almost ready to serve you.

Re:I dunno..

[geminidomino]

Hell, the way things are going, soon hiring a cadre of hookers to rub on you for heat will be less expensive than oil.

Re:I dunno..

[snowraver1]

From Calgary. I pay 7 cents/ kWh for electricity. I don't know a single person that DOES use electricity for heating. It's all natural gas here.

What is the electricity rate in Montreal/Quebec?

Re:I dunno..

[SuperQ]

Yea, I don't know who wrote that bit in the article, but they're just dumb. If you run any kind of system with a load balancer in front of it you can easily script starting up additional machines as soon as your monitoring says you reach 90% capacity.

Re:I dunno..

[PlusFiveTroll]

However, silicon is silicon, capacitors are still made from the same things

Thank you for playing the game, but you have lost. Rather then using more expensive Nippon electronics, the Chinese parts you used had a few part per million more impurities. This lead to early thermal failure of your mainboard.

If you would like to play the game again, please acquire more venture capital and buy quality next time. You may still lose the game to your manufacture buying counterfeit parts, using the wrong specification solder, or unforeseen interactions from running at many gigahertz at high temperature.

This show has been hosted by an automation robot that costs 75 times what your laptop does and still has occasional electronics failures. :)

Re:I dunno..

[AlecC]

This is indeed a factor in positioning data centres not: given the choice, they put them in a cold climate, and some of them are operating a shared heating system.

Re:I dunno..

[drrck]

I had the same problem. So I installed a patch (http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=330909) from Microsoft. Essentially it's looking for a continuous free area on your HD to save your RAM to. I believe the fix is to disable this "feature".

Re:I dunno..

[zefram cochrane]

Not a bad article? If you click off of page one, things go downhill pretty fast. Last time I checked, XPs hibernate mode wrote the RAM image to disk and turned the machine off. And when is the last time you saw a laptop that had a NiCd battery pack???

Re:I dunno..

[pixelpusher220]

Couldn't you upgrade to a single modern machine and run VM's instead of 2 physical machines?

Re:I dunno..

[somersault]

I like your thinking! But wait, on second thought forget the hookers and the rubbing.. no wait, that isn't right..

Re:I dunno..

[somersault]

I agree with you! It's just like how I took this $10 watch down to 200 metres depth without any issues! Oh wait, it's broken. Hmm. When did that happen?

Re:I dunno..

[ceoyoyo]

He did say "cold-balls Canada." Around here most people use gas, and have a fireplace or wood burning stove as a backup because if the power or gas goes out in the winter for more than a few hours the cold kills you.

Re:I dunno..

[camperdave]

I may be a little old fashioned, but I like my firewall to be a completely separate machine.

Re:I dunno..

[hclewk]

From South Texas. I pay 20 cents/kWh for electricity. Unfortunately, there is no non-electricity version of air conditioning, so I cry myself to sleep at night (and yes, it's still fricken hot here).

Re:I dunno..

[Lord Apathy]

There is also more bullshit in that statement than meets the eye. Power cycling a system can cause failure if you have cheap soldering or marginal parts. Powering up a system causes it to heat up, things expand when they heat up. If you have a solder joint that isn't done right the expanding and contracting will cause it to break eventually. I've actually seen surface mounted parts fall off a board because of shotty soldering.

Yeah, true the real problem was shotty soldering but the heating cycles helped it along.

Re:I dunno..

[somersault]

But then how do you get to 'brag' about how green your system is while the customer has to wait for the servers to come online? That was the best idea in the article! It's like having a receptionist who has to take a 5 minute drive into work every time the phone rings..

Re:I dunno..

[crenshawsgc]

I might be overly practical, but for anything you'd be doing out of an apartment with sub-gigahertz machines, you don't need a seperate dedicated hardware firewall.

Re:I dunno..

[TheRaven64]

Take a look at the proceedings from the International Conference on Autonomic Computing for the last few years, and you will see papers from universities and companies like Intel and HP describing efficient ways of doing exactly this.

Re:I dunno..

[TheRaven64]

A lot of sites use two different (sets of) servers for static and dynamic content. You might be serving the pages for displaying items in your store with a machine running Lighttpd but handling the shopping cart on a system running Apache. It often takes people several seconds or even minutes to go from browsing your store to adding items to the cart. When you have a lot of people sending requests to the static parts of the site, this indicates that some proportion of them are likely to be visiting the more dynamic parts and you can use this as a trigger to wake up more machines to handle the cart system.

Re:I dunno..

[Vagnaard]

From the Hydro-Quebec web site (http://www.hydroquebec.com/residential/facture/tarif_d.html) :

Fixed charge per day 0.4064$

First 30 kWh per day 0.0540$

Remaining energy consumption 0.0733$

Exceeding 50 kW in winter (December 1 to March 31) 6.21$ (per month)

Re:I dunno..

[LanMan04]

That being said, I do agree that datacenters' heat should be used to heat useful things (office bldgs, like you suggest).

Well, the goal should be to make the datacenter produce as little heat a possible because you want to do things in the most efficient way possible (although that excess heat should be used as you suggest). Sure, I could heat my house using tons of Xbox 360 power supplies in a pile with a furnace fan blowing across them, and if for some reason I had the need to run 100 Xboxes then yes, it becomes a 'benefit', but it is still really really inefficient.

Each piece of equipment should do what it does BEST all of the time. Centralized natural gas-powered heat is much more efficient, so heat with that. Use the inefficiently-produced heat where you can, but be aware that the total cost would be lower if those servers were cooler.

Re:I dunno..

[tsa]

I'm not sure I would want to put my balls in the fireplace if the power or gas goes out.

Re:I dunno..

[operagost]

The article is full of errors, too. They reverse the descriptions of "suspend" and "hibernate" (it's hibernate mode that saves the system state to disk) and claim that there is significant loss when running DC in a data center. I guess they're stuck on the 19th-century misconceptions about power. It's even more absurd when you realize that the DC only has to travel maybe 10-100 feet on very high quality copper. If this were true, I imagine that we'd even have trouble running devices on those cheap wall warts that have about 6-10 feet of wire carrying low-voltage DC.

Re:I dunno..

[compro01]

I know a total of 5 people who don't use natural gas for heating, and 4 of them use propane as they're so far out of the way the gas network doesn't reach them. only 1 guy uses non-central (heating controlled on a room by room basis) electric. In terms of raw dollars-per-joule, gas is a way better proposition. even after the latest electric rate jump (from 6 cents to 9 cents per KW-hr), gas is still about 1/3 the cost of electric heat.

Re:I dunno..

[afidel]

Yep, HP and VMWare have a cool solution for this, your ESX cluster can grow automatically with machines that are powered off but brought to life through their lights out processor as resource usage increases or when you know you will need additional capacity. A solution I have seen is to move specific DB servers to their own host for nightly batch processing, it theory you could do the same with web and middleware servers to add to a cluster solution on the fly but I haven't personally seen that implemented.

Re:I dunno..

[sexconker]

"Myths" 1-4 are true

I haven't heard "Myth" 5 since 1999.

"Myth" 6 is also true.

When a system suspends to disk, it uses no power.
When a system suspends to RAM, it uses VERY LITTLE (strobe) power, and you can configure wireless adapters and USB devices to be turned OFF when you suspend to RAM. (I'm using "suspend" for both cases - FUCK the sleep/suspend/standby/hibernate/whatever for 2 different states bullshit.)
A laptop's charging circuitry and ac adapter is independent of the power state, so of course the adapter is going to be running all the time to keep the battery charged and power the system.

They admit that the power use is negligible when suspending to disk or RAM (and probably running 3 wireless mice that don't turn off, in an idiotic attempt to boost their non-existent numbers).

They don't admit that they couldn't find anyone who thought that the green light on the power brick meant it was off and using no power.

Myth 7 is true as well.
NiCd batteries do suffer from memory effects, and their capacity decreases over time. Conditioning a NiCd will remove the memory effect, but will not restore lost capacity due to general age.

NiMH batteries have much less of a memory effect, and less of a capacity loss through age. There is no need to condition a NiMH battery. Just drain it fully and then recharge it in a cheapo dumb charger, or buy a better charger (which will likely advertise a battery conditioning feature anyway).

LiIon batteries do lose capacity over time. If a cell (the smaller cells, not the 6 or 9 individual batteries in your laptop's battery) is completely depleted, it won't recharge again. If a cell is overcharged (or overheated), it will pop, and you've lost that capacity., and maybe your pants + laptop if the damn thing catches fire.

"Myth" 8 is true, as long as you remember that the hard drive is just one item drawing juice in a system.

"Myth" 9 is true, as long as you do it right.
The problem with DC is that you lose power over distance. Converting from AC to DC in a specific box can be more efficient than any server power supply, more reliable, and output cleaner power.
The issue is distance.

"Myth" 10 is true. "As soon as possible" means "When the servers are on fire or when we're 6 months overdue on our replacement cycle, whichever comes first...maybe". Energy costs are through the roof, and it makes sense for that to be a high priority in determining what you buy. You may even want to buy a more efficient server/power supply/switch/UPS/line conditioner EARLY if your budget allows for it. We all know that any money sitting around unused will get grabbed up by someone else, so use it or lose it.

That replaced equipment still has value (especially if you replace it early), and if you can resell those, you'll usually wind up ahead. in the long run.

Re:I dunno..

[sexconker]

Yup, they got it wrong.
But it is a fucking mess - sleep/standby/hibernate/suspend? Pick 2 and fucking stick with them, industry.

Re:I dunno..

[compro01]

I would guess you either have a piece of hardware or driver that isn't fully ACPI-compatible or you don't have drive space for the hibernate file.

Re:I dunno..

[operagost]

I'd recommend a Cisco PIX. If that's too expensive, get a decent consumer router like the Linux-based Linksys, then run DD-WRT on it. It doesn't make sense to run firewall software on an old PC at home anymore unless it's a power-sipper like a VIA running off flash.

Re:I dunno..

[afidel]

Then it's still over 75% more expensive to use electric then gas. Natural gas at the (US) national average of ~$1.15/therm is $12.37 per MBtu assuming modern 93% efficient furnace, electric at .073/KWhr is $21.68 per MBtu.

Re:I dunno..

[Vancorps]

That's funny because I've been noticing that they prefer warm climates like here in Arizona because they don't have to worry about burst pipes and have no need to pump potentially hazardous gas into the facility.

A place like Arizona also doesn't have any severe weather worth speaking about so as long as you don't build on a flood plain then all is well.

I've been shopping for DR sites lately and the arguments are pretty sound. Pumping water to cool a place is quite easy and very safe. With departmentalized COLO rooms potential water damage from a pipe magically breaking is quite limited as well especially given that servers are in racks on a raised floor so there would be plenty of time to shut the water off to the burst pipe which is always why they run two pipes in every direction.

Another thing to keep in mind is that cold climates do get warm in the summer time. A desert is a great place to do it as the humidity is low and the only thing you have to do is filter the air that comes into the place aside from regular cooling which you'll have to do regardless.

Re:I dunno..

[RiotingPacifist]

hey ubuntu has that feature too, well actually ot throws the hissy fit when i try and restore, but either way im glad im not missing out on ms goodness.

Re:I dunno..

[Lars T.]

But then how do you get to 'brag' about how green your system is while the customer has to wait for the servers to come online? That was the best idea in the article! It's like having a receptionist who has to take a 5 minute drive into work every time the phone rings..

No, it's like having an extra receptionist who has to take a 5 minute drive into work every time the other receptionists are all talking on the phone. Instead of having them sit around with all the other receptionists, but not doing anything until all others are busy.

IOW, why have a hot-standby waiting to be added to a load-sharing group, when you can have it in the group from the start?

Re:I dunno..

[Fulcrum of Evil]

why would you ever virtualize a production DB?

Re:I dunno..

[legirons]

When the article starts by saying that PC components are the same as auto/industrial components (therefore don't worry about flicking their power supply on and off lots) -- is it even worth reading further?

Just look at auto components' datasheets, they handle wild swings of power supply, temperature and everything else an order of magnitude worse than the consumer-electronics equivalent.

Suggesting that your PC is as robust as industrial controllers is even worse! I don't know about their claim that PCs use the same components as medical devices though - anyone here know how accurate that is?

Re:I dunno..

[ccool]

Well, the problem is to have gas! In most town around big city, the gas do not reach the residential sectors. In all the apartments I have seen, most of them do not have central heating (maybe 2 or 3 out of 10 have central heating). Even though a heat-pump is a lot more efficient, all the older installation I know do not have them. Also, when the temperature goes below -15 or -20, a heat-pump is not any better than direct heating from an electric furnace. All in all, most of the french-canadian just pay their 5-7c /kWh and shut the fsck up!

Re:I dunno..

[Jim_Maryland]

Are you saying you prefer electrical nodes attached to them?

Re:I dunno..

[profplump]

There are non-electric versions of A/C, but they probably aren't a better deal for you unless you get free waste steam from some industrial process:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absorption_refrigerator

Absorption refrigerators are common in mobile installations like RVs -- they can be powered by propane or other combustion systems.

Trane sells the Horizon series of absorption chillers for installations that want to capture energy from waste steam or that have unreliable electricity. They used to sell direct-drive gas-powered centrifugal chillers too, but they've gone to coupling a generator with a chiller to avoid vibration and other issues they had with the direct-drive system.

Re:I dunno..

[R2.0]

You're right.

They don't use Transistors, Inductors and Capacitors at all, do they?

Functionally, the devices might not be used to perform the same precursory things... However, silicon is silicon, capacitors are still made from the same things, and inductors are little more than (get this!!!) lumps of a constant controlled by the turns ratio and other things.

Nope, totally different animals, huh?

Right. And I'm the same as Albert Einstein because I have DNA, amino acids, and funny hair. Where's my Nobel Prize?

A Pinto is the same as a Mercedes because it's made of steel, has 4 wheels, and an engine. I want $75,000 for my used Ford.

My wife is the same as Elle McPherson because she has hair, tits, and a vagina. My wife should be the supermodel (no, really, honey, I was serious on that last one. No, wait...WAIT!...")

Re:I dunno..

[xdroop]

Hey, I had a Linux install that did that. I was compatible and I didn't even know it!

Re:I dunno..

[afidel]

To be more efficient and have better HA without paying crazy amounts to IBM/Oracle/MS for clustering. With modern virtualization like Xen or ESX 3.5 there's little penalty for virtualization if you do raw disk access.

Re:I dunno..

[petergun]

Here in cold-balls Montreal, EVERYONE has electric heating; most people haven't made use of central heating, as Hydro Quebec is the defacto logic.

That said, after the infamous Ice Storm, many have wood/gas/oil heaters as well.

Re:I dunno..

[ShieldW0lf]

When your electricity is produced domestically from permanent renewable power generation installations like Quebec, it makes more sense to use electricity than to purchase oil and gas from afar.

The wise thing for us to do is to meet our needs with such as much as is possible and retain our non-renewable energy sources for the creation of new permanent renewable power generation installations.

As it stands, we're behaving like a pack of idiots. History will look back upon us with resentment and disgust for our rampant wastefulness. Our civilization is the pinnacle of short sighted stupidity.

Re:I dunno..

[afidel]

Doctors offices do this quite frequently, they use a shared answering service for when their staff is too busy or not available. You might sit on hold some period of time before their phone system transfers you due to the high marginal cost of the outside service, it's not really all that different.

Re:I dunno..

[nasch]

Isn't that extremely efficient? Resistive heating is 100% efficient: it converts every bit of electricity going in to heat. Is there something else going on with a power brick such that some of the power is not generating heat? And if so, what? How much it costs is a separate question, and one that's not relevant if like me you don't have any source of heat other than electricity.

I'm not suggesting we should be using 360 power supplies to heat our homes, only questioning whether it would be inefficient to do so, compared to conventional electric heating.

Re:I dunno..

[nasch]

Ooooh, she's a hot standby? Pics please!

Re:I dunno..

[tsa]

Yeah, that gives a nice tickly feeling!

Re:I dunno..

[Fulcrum of Evil]

At my last work, we ran into some serious problems using xen virts for DB apps; luckily, we found out about the problems before entering prod, so it didn't impact us operationally.

Re:I dunno..

[UncleTogie]

From South Texas. I pay 20 cents/kWh for electricity. Unfortunately, there is no non-electricity version of air conditioning, so I cry myself to sleep at night (and yes, it's still fricken hot here).

Where the heck in South Texas are you?!? I'm in San Antonio, and we're not paying near that rate here...

Re:I dunno..

[operagost]

You fail at history. I mean, the Roman Empire alone has a list of debauchery, wastefulness, and unrealized potential 100 leagues long.

Re:I dunno..

[operagost]

hair, tits, and a vagina.

For most geeks looking for a girlfriend, that list is followed by the phrase, "Pick any two."

Re:I dunno..

[afidel]

Xen commercially from Citrix or open source with your distro?

Re:I dunno..

[mcgrew]

Electric heat is almost always the most expensive kind of heat. I say "almost always" because if you're in a warm climate where you almost never need heat, and your only gas heat is propane, gas may well be more expensive.

Or you could live in a strange cartoon-like existance (say, here in Springfield) where the city runs the electric company but the gas company is run by Vogons and Ferengi.

I'm thinking about buying an electric water heater to run alongside my gas one; gas hot water in the summer when gas is cheaper, and electric hot water in the winter.

Re:I dunno..

[Hamstaus]

If you are using electric heat, chances are you don't live in a cold climate and pay for air conditioning for much of the year negating any "savings". Here in cold-balls Canada, EVERYONE has centeral heating; it's too expensive to use electricity. That being said, I do agree that datacenters' heat should be used to heat useful things (office bldgs, like you suggest).

You must be from the East. In BC, a significant portion of the province's electricity is generated by hydro power, making it very cheap. Most of the homes I've been in on Vancouver Island do not have central heating. Electric baseboard heaters are the norm. Because the climate is moderated by the ocean, it never gets atrociously cold, nor does it get extremely hot. I've never owned a car with A/C, and never needed anything more than a simple fan for cooling purposes. It rarely goes over 30 degrees in the summer for more than a day or two at a time. Quite pleasant, really.

I used to live in a tiny apartment above a garage, which contributed to it being freezing (relatively) in the winter. I would turn on my electric baseboard heaters for a short time in the morning, and my two linux servers, one XP box and one laptop would keep it toasty for the rest of the day.

Re:I dunno..

[sumdumass]

It's going to all depend on several things like when the home was built, if it is an apartment complex or a whole house, what resources were in the area when it was built and likely the cheapest heating source at the time it was built along with the infrastructure in place at that time. Apartment complexes like to shy away from natural gas because of the flammability and stupidity of people plus the convenience of one bill. Homes trend to go with what was the cheapest to use at the time of instillation.

I live in an area that has had a population around for quite a while and options range from public utility gas to oil and coal fired boilers to wood burning stoves to electric heat. Some of the houses are old enough that the boilers were the common source for whole house heat and some use electric or gas. Although the fuel oil and propane is typically outside the city limits.

I agree that natural gas seems to be the best resource for the job. I currently have the option to use either Gas or Electric depending on which is cheaper when I need them. I could also swap out the orifice and regulator (the gas furnace came with the parts) and run on propane or LP if I needed to. I normally use natural gas because it is the cheapest and most reliable in my area and you don't get that cold draft effect as much like electric used to be known for. I can run about $60 in electric and $40-$80 per month in Gas in a typical central-Ohio winter. If I went with straight electric, the bill would run around $200 a month. Of course both would be worse if the winter was worse. I also cook with gas which helps when the electric goes out in the winter (ice storms, road accidents, all sorts of things, I'm out in the country a bit). My generator can handle the furnace on natural gas if I unplug the fridge where it isn't powerful enough to run the electric heat or AC which saved me some money over all too.

Anyways, my home was built in the mid 80's and the AC was added after the Gas heat was spec'ed out and the AC unit came with a heater (no heat pump) that was plumbed in too. I can actually run both at once but there is a spring/weight loaded valve that stop the one from back feeding into the other. The house is sealed up pretty good from when it was built and with plastic over the windows, I could actually heat it with two Kerosene heaters but that costs even more ($4 to $5 dollars a gallon and about 2 gallons a day = around $240 or so a month) . The one I had before this had a coal/fuel oil boiler with radiant heat in every room and it cost about the same as the current electric situation but that was back when fuel oil was cheaper.

Of course the only thing I would cation with my experiences is with those Eden pure electric heaters. A friend uses something like 3 of them and has an electric bill of around $80 a month in a house more drafty them mine but a little smaller. It's never "cold" either.

Re:I dunno..

[Fulcrum of Evil]

open source, most likely. Not sure if they were using 3.0 or not, but we had a major hit on IO with virts.

Re:I dunno..

[R2.0]

"For most geeks looking for a girlfriend, that list is followed by the phrase, "Pick any two.""

Hmmm, lets see.

Hair+Vagina-tits - pre-pubescent. No thanks - I like being on THIS side of a jail door.

Hair+Tits-vagina - Pre-op transexual. That's and example of an UNHAPPY surprise.

Tits+Vagina-hair - Sinead O'Connor. RUN!!! RUN AWAY!!!!

Re:I dunno..

[afidel]

What kind of disk's? There are a lot of ways to do disks in a virtualization environment and they are definitely not equal. For production DB's the best I've seen is ESX 3.5 with raw FC access and native volumes, only an ~10% I/O penalty which can be acceptable depending on the workload and cost/benifit analysis. Using 3.0 or Xen with NFS volumes was terribly painful for DB stuff.

Re:I dunno..

[sumdumass]

I don't think you should have been modded flamebate but the plusfivetroll is correct.

While the components do the same things, they are built to different standards. These standards usually result in different tollorances. Take a cheap Linksys wireless router and put it on your front porch for a couple days in the winter when it gets to 20 below zero and see what happens if you don't believe me. You can cover it and keep it out of the cold too. But WISPs end up with routers built to handle the cold which which last uneffected in the same cold.

I guess the easiest way to explain this is to use a Car analogy. I know they are popular on slashdot so it should clear things up a little. Imagine a half ton SUV. It has a frame, a trailer hitch, tires and all. But even with the super powerful engine and transmission, you can only tow or load it with so much weight before before the suspension give way and the axle's start stressing. Now, there are some SUVs that have a full three quater ton chassis which means it can handle the extra weight safely. If you goto U-haul to rent a trailer, they will have some that are too big to safely pull behind a half ton vehicle and won't rent it to you unless you pick it up in a 3/4 ton vehicle.

Similarly, the cheap consumer components in PCs and most servers aren't the highly specific tolerance grade components that are the same as on the floor of a factory or something. They might last but they aren't rated to last and that is important in selecting components to be used for the job.

Re:I dunno..

[PC and Sony Fanboy]

This article is basically a verbose version of the "nuh uh" argument.

... Hey, its slashdot, the whole forum is filled with "nuh uh" arguments ...

Re:I dunno..

[Fulcrum of Evil]

Disks were either sata or sas - given that they were DB servers and recalling the specs, I'd say it was RAID5 SAS. I don't even want to think about Oracle over NFS.

Re:I dunno..

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

But what I'm referring to are those times when traffic exceeds predictions. In a call center environment - even a properly planned and managed one - it can happen however unlikely it may be. (Multiple network outages have been the primary cause I've seen, as opposed to simple increased traffic.) When every second your call center reps are speaking with customers (or asking them to hold) costs money, the electric costs are secondary.

Re:I dunno..

[ceoyoyo]

Obviously your balls have never been really cold.

You should read "The Cremation of Sam McGee" by Robert Service.

Re:I dunno..

[Waffle Iron]

Resistive heating is 100% efficient: it converts every bit of electricity going in to heat.

However, typically no more than 40% of the fuel energy used in electrical power generation ends up making it to your home. Resistive heating is hugely wasteful, the waste just happens where you don't see it.

Re:I dunno..

[oblivionboy]

Where the hell are you in Canada? In my duplex (in the Montreal area), I use electric heating which I find pretty efficient if used with a thermostat in each room. Some places have water heating which is a bit more onerous. I guess you must live in a small town or something.

Re:I dunno..

[nasch]

That has nothing to do with resistive heating and everything to do with how I'm getting my electricity. It could be coal, nuclear, geothermal, solar, wind... Natural gas is a temporary solution, since it will run out eventually. For now, it's a better solution than electric heating for most places in the US, and in fact the house I'm moving to has gas heat.

For a permanent solution we'll be going back to electric heating since that will be compatible with all the renewable sources of energy we'll be using in the future.

Re:I dunno..

[jeffeb3]

The Colorado School of Mines uses steam from the beer making process at Coors to heat their buildings. There is a whole interconnected network of steam pipes underneath the city of Golden.

Re:I dunno..

[somersault]

That's still too much of a delay. If it is imperative that customers be served immediately (as it would be in an online banking site or other for-profit site), you'd better start bringing in extra receptionists before you reach capacity, or you're going to lose business to competitors..

I'm not sure if your last sentence is rhetorical or not.. most businesses will be able to measure peak call times and alter their staff requirements accordingly. It's no different for servers, apart from you don't have to pay a salary to the machines that are waiting on standby so it makes a lot more sense to dynamically vary the group size even when peak times are not predictable.

Re:I dunno..

[fabs64]

And the wasted electrical heat generated by the servers can't be used to offset the usage of fossil fuel heating? These two types of heat are fundamentally different and can't be combined?

Re:I dunno..

[fabs64]

Eek, slight correction, power loss is a function of resistance and current. Whether it's AC or DC has nothing to do with it. In fact extremely high voltage transmission lines use DC in Japan.

We use AC because it's much cheaper to step it up to a very high voltage to lower the current (thereby lowering Pl), and then step it back down again once we're at our destination.
Power Loss = I^2R

I'm sceptical about the "memory effect" claim, but I don't know enough about batteries to claim you're wrong. I'll just leave you with a link to a guy I trust more than random /. commenters. http://www.dansdata.com/gz011.htm

Re:I dunno..

[darkpixel2k]

There is also more bullshit in that statement than meets the eye. Power cycling a system can cause failure if you have cheap soldering or marginal parts.

Sounds like someone is speaking from experience.

My boss asked me why we don't power down the servers and workstations overnight and on the weekends. I told him it was to help eliminate the monday morning disaster that would follow.

He didn't believe me.
There are 50 computers in his company that are more than 3 years old.
He told me to turn them off over the weekend.

Sure enough--Monday morning a server power supply failed along with 4 workstations. One of the workstations fried itself and had to be replaced.

I spent the entire day running around--to the local parts store for power supplies (because we had 2 spares on-hand), and to the 5 different offices that had dead PCs.

Now we just pay the extra $15 per month per office in increased electrical bills rather than the roughly $1200 spent in purchasing power supplies, paying for fuel costs, buying a new computer, paying for staff to sit around, etc...

Like the BOFH said: Computers are like old people. If you put them to sleep at night, some won't wake up in the morning.

Re:I dunno..

[aiht]

... the flammability and stupidity of people ...

Yeah!
Stupid flammable people...

Re:I dunno..

[DiegoBravo]

Of course a diagnostic message for that kind of error would be too complicated/ugly for a standard XP-user, so the system just halts miserably. Later your vendor/rep says: aha... that happens to silly people that don't upgrade to the robustness of Vista!

Re:I dunno..

[malejko]

It's them Easterners... they're the ones on the fancy hydro power. Natural gas and propane for us Westerners is a much more efficient way to heat our homes. The old oil furnaces would be getting to be more expensive these days.

Re:I dunno..

[CapnStank]

So half the time I visit Slashdot I read chanting of "Physical access == no security" and now I hear, "drop those servers into publically accessed locations!" Something doesn't add up.

Re:I dunno..

[sumdumass]

I guess that should be "and the stupidity of people".

I know people who have stored half empty cans of gasoline for the lawn mower or flammable chemicals in the same utility closets as the furnace because it seemed like a place to shove stuff like that. With a gas furnace, the pilot light or even the newer light on demand furnaces could create an explosion of flammable fumes if it filled the closet when it fired up. Usually with gas furnaces, you have gas water heaters so your not even safe in the summer.

This is actually a more common then not scenario and is one of the biggest home hazards people can be faced with. People don't really think about things like that sometimes but I'm sure we can all guess what happens when the pain stripper fumes or gas vapors or cleaning solvents or contact cement or whatever ignites. And if we are lucky, the neighbors will have batteries in their smoke alarms and get out before it kills one of them. An electric furnace and water heater sits the heating elements a little higher off the ground (water heaters are actually enclosed in water) so vapors have to pool higher and because it isn't an open flame, the air fuel mixtures have to be different for ignition and combustion.

I was in a house once where someone was using/had used an old black iron gas pipe for a close hanger when doing laundry. When it sprung a leak, it went unnoticed for a while and simply turning the lights on a couple of hours later to check where the rotten egg smells were coming from cause a flash fire in the basement that ended up destroying most of the first floor. It singed most the hair off the guy who went looking an knocked him up 3 steps and back about 5 foot into a wall. Thankfully he wasn't seriously hurt but I had to move the same day with only what I carried out because the fire department said the house wasn't safe to go back in. There were three units in the house, two down stairs and my apartment upstairs.

Re:I dunno..

[emurphy42]

Either you mis-quoted, or they fixed the article after you posted. It currently reads:

Sleep in Vista and Standby mode in XP save the state of the system to RAM and then maintains the RAM image even though the rest of the system is powered down. Hibernate saves the state of the system to hard disk, which reduces the boot time greatly and allows the system to be shut down.

Re:I dunno..

[sexconker]

And resistance in a given wire is directly proportional to it's length.

The reason Japan got away with it is because they have small country.
Power transmission over great distance sucks with DC, and is good with AC.
And yes, you also get the power stepping bonus.

From shitipedia:

"However, even with this innovation, the voltage drop due to the resistance of the system conductors was so high that generating plants had to be located within a mile (1-2 km) or so of the load. ...
Edison's response to the DC system limitations was to generate power close to where it was consumed..."

I was referring to "memory effect" in the same sense that the article is. Your link explains it in more detail, and is exactly correct.
Completely draining a cell pretty much kills it (definitely so for LiIon), but no conditioner (that I know of) does that. It drops the thing to a set voltage depending on the battery. A NiMH AA is 1.25 V full charged, and could be considered "completely dead" at .6 or .5 volts. The point at which you want to discharge to before charging depends on the power curve of the battery. Fancy conditioners will track this curve, discharge to just beyond the steepest drop off on the tail end, trickle charge to hold it there for a while (to let the cells even out) and then charge up, back off, charge up, back off, etc. until it's full. If you repeat the process, you can get a more accurate power curve, and thus better results. This puts a lot of wear on the batteries though, so you should only ever condition a battery that you're ready to throw away. I mean, recycle. Conditioning your old batteries can get you a few cycles, or a hundred cycles. Using a good charger (which all conditioners double as) on your new batteries will keep them lasting long and strong.

Re:I dunno..

[fabs64]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HVDC

Have you got at least a reasonable explanation as to why "Power transmission over great distance sucks with DC, and is good with AC." let alone a source?
Also from "shitpedia" for your interest:

The advantage of AC for distributing power over a distance is due to the ease of changing voltages with a transformer. Power is the product current Ã-- voltage (P = IV). For a given amount of power, a low voltage requires a higher current and a higher voltage requires a lower current. Since metal conducting wires have a certain resistance, some power will be wasted as heat in the wires. This power loss is given by P = IÂR. Thus, if the overall transmitted power is the same, and given the constraints of practical conductor sizes, low-voltage, high-current transmissions will suffer a much greater power loss than high-voltage, low-current ones. This holds whether DC or AC is used.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_Currents

And the ACTUAL reason that Japan uses DC is not because it's small, it's because they need to move power between islands:

Alternating current transmission lines do have other losses not observed with direct current. Due to the skin effect, a conductor will have a higher resistance to alternating current than to direct current; the effect is measurable and of practical significance for large conductors carrying on the order of thousands of amperes. The increased resistance due to the skin effect can be offset by changing the shape of conductors from a solid core to a braid of many small wires.

Re:I dunno..

[rthille]

If they are sub-GHz machines, they are probably older and less power efficient than they could be.

I've got a 1.5GHz system (via C7) with 4 drives and it draws just 75watts. I could probably save another 16 watts by switching to the GreenPower drives from WD, but I'm still waiting for the 1TB drives to come down more.

Of course that's more than the 25 watts my old Cobalt RaQ2+ with 2 drives, but the speed is worth it in my estimation.

Re:I dunno..

[compro01]

Vista does the same thing. Just goes "hibernating..." then bounces back to the desktop. Nothing in the event log about it either. Did it on my new HP laptop out of the box, though the first trip to windows update provided a new soundcard driver which fixed that and it now hibernates fine.

Re:I dunno..

[mcvos]

I have no control over the heating in my apartment. Thus, I have to have an air conditioner running 24/7/365

Running AC and heating at the same time seems like the most useless and wasteful waste of energy to me.
You can't help it ofcourse, and I wouldn't be surprised if you're not the only one in that situation. So instead of worrying about the energy used by idling servers, wouldn't it make more sense to simply fix the heating of badly designed buildings?

Re:I dunno..

[mcvos]

Hate to agree with Anrego but it does sound like a lot of self serving Eco-nut preaching, without any basis in fact.

It's bad eco-nut preaching. I'm an eco-nut myself, and half the points in TFA made little sense to me. I've seen far better articles on how to save energy in computers.

I don't have any links with me, but here are a couple of easy points:

rule #1: get a good power supply. TFA is correct that some power supplies suck. TFA is not correct that it's hard to figure out how efficient PSUs are. 80+ rating is pretty common nowadays, and I believe they recently added some more granularity to that rating.
Furthermore, make sure the PSU fits the actual power demand. They're most efficient when they run at 50%, so using a 600W PSU for a PC that runs at 100-200W wastes more energy than using a 300W PSU for that PC.

And when you're talking about servers, how is it possible that virtualisation isn't getting mentioned? A virtual server uses exactly as much power as it needs, and is never idling. Surplus processing power is used by other virtual servers. With enough virtual servers, it becomes a lot easier to predict when more physical servers are needed to handle the load.

Re:I dunno..

[Toll_Free]

As a certified BMW mechanic, I can tell you that you are both full of shit.

The enclosures are built differently (and not all that much), but the electronics are the same.

The enclosures are built to handle the increased vibration, etc. that comes from a mobile environment.

HOWEVER, as someone trained to replace such components (if something in the car comes to end of life cycle), I know for a fact that the components in the computers / related electronics in the car are the EXACT same parts you can order at Radio Shack (or Mouser / DigiKEY / MCM / insert favorite mail-order house here).

Funny, a bunch of geeks who know nothing of the internals of a computer in a car telling a trained mechanic how they function.

--Toll_Free

Re:I dunno..

[(Score.5, Interestin]

I'm of the school that thinks "debunking" involves some kind of comprehensive stats or numbers or evidence weight against strongly held opinions.

This article is basically a verbose version of the "nuh uh" argument.

Pretty much, and some of their claims are rather dubious, or based on really odd ideas (NiCd batteries in laptops? They haven't been used for that in 20 years!). Their point #1 just seems like nonsense, if they're going to make a claim like that they better have some pretty heavy evidence to back it up. Point #5 is at best a distortion, there are a range of monitor power mgt.schemes that may be enabled, and the PC may have it enabled by default as well. Point #7 is a weird mangling of information on LiIon batteries that only just corresponds to real life, and isn't actually useful for anyone wanting help in prolonging battery life. Point #9 is just as bad, they've mangled a complex situation into a single paragraph that fails to provide any useful information.

Re:I dunno..

[camperdave]

So instead of worrying about the energy used by idling servers, wouldn't it make more sense to simply fix the heating of badly designed buildings?

Sadly, it's a bit late in my lifespan to consider becoming an HVAC consultant. On the other hand, I'm not worried about the energy used by idling servers either. There are far worse energy wasting things on the planet. For example, how many single floor escalators are there in continuous operation? Turn them off and start them up when someone approaches and breaks a light beam. Or better yet, just turn them off, and let people walk up under their own power.

Re:I dunno..

[mollymoo]

Isn't that extremely efficient? Resistive heating is 100% efficient: it converts every bit of electricity going in to heat.

You can get more than 100% efficiency (heat output/electricity input) using a heat pump, so 100% efficiency really isn't so great.

Re:I dunno..

[nasch]

You can get more than 100 joules of heat energy from less than 100 joules of electrical energy? How does that work? You sure you're not thinking of cooling, where you can *move* heat at greater than 100% efficiency?

Re:I dunno..

[mollymoo]

A component is a component, right? An LM317 voltage regulator is an LM317 voltage regulator, right? Wrong. If we take National Semiconductor's range as an example, I expect Linksys would use the LM317T because they don't expect me to operate my NAS below freezing, but I'd damn well hope BMW would use the LM317AT because I don't want part of my $100k car to stop working because the epoxy package of a $0.70 voltage regulator failed at -15 C.

I'd stick to the spanners and module-level repair if I were you.

Re:I dunno..

[Toll_Free]

You answered your own question, stupid.

An LM317 is (outdated as hell) an LM317.

The T designator came out about 20 revisions later, and is designated as such.

Any X86 CPU is the same, right? Your argument would mean it would be. Or that my 64 bit CPU is the same, since it's still > a CPU.

My point is, they don't make an LM317T for cars, and a seperate one for consumer grade equipment.

Hell, FINDING a standard LM317 would take some doing now, since it predates the LM317T, and the T model is considered "standard".

I suggest you actually build something first. Search my moniker online, and find that I do, in fact, build HIGH power amplifiers and communication equipment.

Module level repair my ass. Next time you think you can tame a 3CW40,000 tube in an HF circuit doing 40Kw of carrier power and 160 to 175 Kw peak, you give me a call. Your "spanners and modules" can be toasted, literally, by the power in the filaments of one of my tubes.

But, I digress. Slashdot is full of people who read a book and become instant experts. Comparing similiar model / part numbers and expecting me to fall for that is, for lack of better terms, your stupidity at it's finest.

Or is the 5X86 the same thing as a Pentium chip? A 486 chip? I mean, it's ONLY one letter from being a 586, the (at the time) common, next designation of the lineage of the chip line, right? WAIT, they aren't the same, only similiar, built to do nearly the same end result.

Kind of like your LM317 / LM317T analogy upstairs, huh?

--Toll_Free

Re:I dunno..

[mollymoo]

I did say using a heat pump. You use the electricity to pump heat from outside to inside, like an air conditioner in reverse. You put in 1 kW of electricity, you get (say) 3kW of heat. 2 kW of that heat comes from the air or ground outside, you're not creating it, but for the measure of efficiency which matters for home heating - kW of heat in your home per kW of electricity used - heat pumps are more than 100% efficient. Of course in physics terms they aren't more than 100% efficient, but in economic terms they are.

Re:I dunno..

[mollymoo]

You fail at reading comprehension in addition to electronics knowledge. Both 317s I listed were Ts. One was an AT and one was just a T. I gave you a fucking huge clue that the difference was the temperature rating by talking about that difference, but apparently you're too stupid to get the hint. Here you go: The LM317T comes in a TO-220 and is rated to 0 C. The electrically identical LM317AT also comes in a TO-220 but is rated to -40 C. That is a very significant difference and is exactly the kind of difference which distinguishes the components used in consumer electronics than those designed for more robust environments like cars.

My point is, they don't make an LM317T for cars, and a seperate one for consumer grade equipment.

Then tell me why National Semiconductor sell two models of the LM317T with different temperature ratings. Go and see for yourself, I'm not making this up. There is nothing special about National Semiconductor or the 317 - they were just the first manufacturer and component that came into my head. I was rather hoping they'd have some a fancy ceramic mil-spec package as well to prove you even more wrong, but they didn't. Not that such things don't exist, I just can't be bothered to find you an example.

Re:I dunno..

[mollymoo]

If you shut the machines off every weekend you'd have discovered those marginal machines one at a time over the course of months. You had a great example of how your current strategy will fuck you over after a power cut but apparently didn't learn the lesson.

Re:I dunno..

[sexconker]

Because of the cost involved with setting up inverters maybe? Because of the much lower overload capacity? Because Power flow has to be actively regulated? Because it is far more complex to expand?

A smaller nation can go with DC because of the reduced cost and complexity, as well as the reduced need for expansion.

As for Japan and islands, no.
Undersea cables and capacitance.
Learn something about physics.

Re:I dunno..

[nasch]

Gotcha, and the efficiency depends on temperature difference, apparently the closer the temperature the more efficient it is.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_pump

"Ultimately, due to Carnot efficiency limits, the heat pump's performance will approach 1.0 as the outdoor-to-indoor temperature difference increases. This typically occurs around â'18 ÂC (0 ÂF) outdoor temperature for air source heat pumps. Also, as the heat pump takes heat out of the air, some moisture in the outdoor air may condense and possibly freeze on the outdoor heat exchanger. The system must periodically melt this ice. In other words, when it is extremely cold outside, it is simpler, and wears the machine less, to heat using an electric-resistance heater than to strain an air-source heat pump."

So sometimes 1.0 is the best you can do, although obviously there are lots of places where such temperatures wouldn't be a concern.

"When comparing the performance of heat pumps, it is best to avoid the word "efficiency" which has a very specific thermodynamic definition. The term coefficient of performance (COP) is used to describe the ratio of useful heat movement to work input."

Re:I dunno..

[Nursie]

But what I'm referring to are those times when traffic exceeds predictions.

In which case you haven't got the capacity in the first place!

Re:I dunno..

[badkarmadayaccount]

Uhhh... run the exahust air through powered down servers so as to maintain ambient temperature?

Re:I dunno..

[zippthorne]

Read their debunking of (1). The first part is ok: they claim that temperature cycling doesn't do noticeable damage.

The second part is what's weird: they claim that POST is a benefit even if T cycling DOES cause noticeable damage, because you'll find out about it right away.

Then in the very next one (2), they go on to recommend a power-off method that skips POST, thereby getting the worst of both worlds.

Re:I dunno..

[Viperpete]

I live in a large house alone and spend most of my time in 1 room.

I keep the central heating down to 67 deg. F and my computer room will remain a balmy 76 deg. F.

Maybe I should get out more....

Re:I dunno..

[juan2074]

A place like Arizona also doesn't have any severe weather worth speaking about

Heard of the state capital, Phoenix? It is sweaty-balls hot for about half of the year. (And it can get pretty cold at night during winter months.)

If people can't comfortably walk outside, it is extreme weather.

Re:I dunno..

[badkarmadayaccount]

Yah, but does my idea make sense in general?

Sleep != Hibernate

[Taimat]

Myth No. 6: A notebook doesn't use any power when it's suspended or sleeping. USB devices charge from the notebook's AC adapter. Fact: Sleep (in Vista) or Hibernate mode in XP saves the state of the system to RAM and then maintains the RAM image even though the rest of the system is powered down. Suspend saves the state of the system to hard disk, which reduces the boot time greatly and allows the system to be shut down. Sleeping continues to draw a small amount of power, between 1 and 3 watts, even though the system appears to be inactive. By comparison, Suspend draws less than 1 watt. Even over the course of a year, this difference is probably negligible.

um... Hibernate != Sleep. Hibernate in XP saves the RAM to the Hard Drive, and powers off. Suspend keeps RAM powered....

Re:Sleep != Hibernate

[gEvil (beta)]

Mod up! The article got this one completely backwards.

Re:Sleep != Hibernate

[EvilRyry]

Using my handy killawatt, I tested how much power my desktop (not including accessories) draws while off, on and idle, on and under load, and in S3 suspend.

Off - 6 watts
Idle - 140W (dropped from 152W after installing a tickless kernel)
Loaded - 220W
S3 - 8 watts

Ever since I ran that test, I put my machine into suspend at every opportunity. 140W is a lot of juice in the land of $0.18/kWh.

Re:Sleep != Hibernate

[afidel]

How about build an energy efficient PC! I have a LP AMD 64 x2 with a Geforce 7600GS, 2 HDD's, 2GB of ram and a TV tuner and an 85% efficient PSU and I peak at around 150W, using 140W at idle is insane. For the next generation of games I'm thinking about upgrading to a 9600 GSO but that will up my idle and peak numbers by at 20W so I'm holding off till I get a game that really needs it.

Re:Sleep != Hibernate

[Volante3192]

My kingdom for a mod point...

I built a new system in July, Intel Core2Duo E8400, 2gb ram, ATI 3850, two hds (one's a raptor), and the box on idle pulls 81W.

My old box, an Athlon 1800+ (actual speed: 1350hz), 2gb ram, two HDs...idle was in the 130s 140s.

(Both are excluding monitor, a 20" LCD with pulls 35-40W)

So not only did I build me a faster system, it's nearly half as power hungry as my old box.

Re:Sleep != Hibernate

[Toll_Free]

The problem is your only looking at baseline power.

Your power rates go up as you use more power daily, weekly and monthly. Some utilities can also charge you depending on the time your using the power.

So, your answer is VERY simplistic, but shows a BASE cost of running that computer, if you have NOTHING else on during that time.

Actual expenses, in my experience, are two to three times what your posing, just due to the fact that electricity rates can double or triple post base-line power.

--Toll_Free

Re:Sleep != Hibernate

[Kjella]

0.14kW *0.18$/kWh * 8*200h = 40$? at years? of electricity? not a whole saving you could get from reducing that. or I'm doing it all wrong?

Something's wrong about the units but I think the figure is right. Of course, it also depends on what climate you're in, if you're running an AC to get rid of those 140W again that costs too, while here up north a lot of the time it supplements other heating in the winter so it actually costs less. Anyway I haven't bothered to check but I imagine my 42" TV draws more when it's on so it's not like the computer is the big sinner. For me lower power is about less fans and less noise, there's no way 140W draw is silent.

Re:Sleep != Hibernate

[cpghost]

140W is a lot of juice in the land of $0.18/kWh.

It's even a lot more in Europe, at approx. EUR 0.25/kWh ($0.34/kWh)...

Re:Sleep != Hibernate

[thepotoo]

OK, I have a stupid question. How do you tell how much power a component is going to pull before you buy it?

Looking around newegg, I only see a handful of "green" items that advertise their low power usage.

For the record, my system pulls 120 W idle, 230 running CoHOF, and 5 in S3. It is extremely overclocked and mostly older components which tends to skew things, but I'm looking to upgrade and wouldn't mind saving a few bucks in energy costs in the long term.

Re:Sleep != Hibernate

[MrSteve007]

Your numbers are a bit low. Most of the workstations at our office consume 250-300 watts at idle, and usually people leave them on during the lunch hour.

300 watts, for 9 hours = 2.7kWh per system per day

At 200 days of use, that's 540 kWh, which using your billing rate equals out to $97.2 per PC. Not massive, but more than double your numbers.

Re:Sleep != Hibernate

[644bd346996]

http://anandtech.com/casecoolingpsus/showdoc.aspx?i=3413

Even though the article is about power supplies, it has quite a bit of information about how much power various components draw.

Re:Sleep != Hibernate

[Volante3192]

Unless you check reviews, which show real world usage, it's doubtful you'll find anything even in the manufacturer's specs that's useful.

I didn't even really consider power when I built it outside of the CPU (and that was more a matter of just choosing 45nm over 65nm); I just picked the parts I wanted. When I found it was less of a power hog, I was more than delightfully surprised.

Course, I should probably check my power usage one day when I'm actually *using* the PC...I just keep forgetting.

Re:Sleep != Hibernate

[Sancho]

If you do some digging, you can find power requirements of most components. Usually you'll need to go to the manufacturer, rather than a reseller. Intel has theirs listed on their data sheets, for example. I found this mostly because I was looking for thermal data on devices, to build a machine which was going to go into a room without good climate control.

Re:Sleep != Hibernate

[afidel]

One easy tipoff is if it has a heatsink instead of a fan it's probably low power =) I have 4 fans total in my system, one 120mm intake, one 120mm exhaust, one 120mm in the PSU and one 80mm on the CPU. You can also check out review sites as graphics card reviews often feature power usage numbers (though that gives you relative performance in a test system rather than component level numbers alone). Integrated peripherals that don't tax the CPU excessively are also more power efficient than discrete addon cards so I went with a MB that had everything I wanted short of graphics and the tv tuner.

Re:Sleep != Hibernate

[TheRaven64]

Your power rates go up as you use more power daily, weekly and monthly.

Really? I pay a fixed amount per unit (kWh) of gas or electricity up to a certain threshold, and then a significantly reduced rate (around a quarter of the price for gas, I can't remember for electricity) for anything used over that.

Re:Sleep != Hibernate

[tknd]

For the record, my system pulls 120 W idle, 230 running CoHOF, and 5 in S3. It is extremely overclocked and mostly older components which tends to skew things, but I'm looking to upgrade and wouldn't mind saving a few bucks in energy costs in the long term.

5 watts in S3 is pretty bad in my book. Disconnect all USB devices and check again what your S3 power consumption is. If it is still high, most likely the PSU you have is not efficient. It could also come from other things like the motherboard, but most of the time it is the PSU. If your system idles at 120w, and 230w during load, you might be able to run with as low as a good 350w rated PSU. For example if your current PSU was around 70% efficient and you replaced it with an 80% efficient one, then during load your 230w draw would drop to around 201w. But you'll have to check and see if you can find the efficiency numbers for your current PSU.

How do you tell how much power a component is going to pull before you buy it?

There's no single source, but there are some useful websites.

80plus.org
Silent PC Review They generally provide both noise and power consumption measurements in their reviews
Silent PC Review Forums More anecdotal but at this point it is still good data. Many users post their own tests and measurements on the boards. It helps you get an idea of what's achievable and what isn't. There are also some nicely compiled charts that combine data from difference sources. I find the numbers are sometimes inaccurate but not too far off.

Re:Sleep != Hibernate

[thepotoo]

That page made my bookmarks. You officially kick ass.

Re:Sleep != Hibernate

[compro01]

!

What the heck kind of machines are you running? my gaming desktop (3.0ghz core 2 duo, 2GB ram, 8800GTS 640MB, 1 hard drive) draws about 240W at idle (about 360W running flat out, 20W in S3, and about 2W when off), including my old 17" CRT.

Re:Sleep != Hibernate

[repvik]

Depends on where in Europe. Right now the prices in Norway are pretty high (relative), at about EUR 0.12 (USD 0.16)/kWh. One year ago, the price was one third of this. Water-generated electricity FTW :)

Re:Sleep != Hibernate

[mybecq]

One thing I have noticed is that old (failing?) power supplies suck up more power than newer ones.
I used to have a machine that idled at about 100W; when I measured it a few years later (after some power issues), it was nearly 200W. I put in a new power supply and it was down to about 90W.

Re:Sleep != Hibernate

[viper66]

CPU makers don't list the power that their CPUs actually consume. They list the Thermal Design Power, which is a bit different.

Re:Sleep != Hibernate

[AK Marc]

I used killawatt on my PC and laptop. My PC (not counting monitor) used less power when on, idle, under load, off, and suspend than the laptop. In fact, my desktop used less power when in suspend than my laptop uses when off. I picked a "green" motherboard, a desktop/laptop CPU, the most powerfull fanless video card I could find and it sees DVR and casual gaming use and works much better at those than the power-hungry laptop. I suspend it whenever I can.

Re:Sleep != Hibernate

[TeknoHog]

How about build an energy efficient PC!

Well, my machine has an 80-watt PSU, enough to keep it fully loaded even without undervolting.

I've noticed that the 'mobile' version of a processor usually consumes roughly half of the power of the 'desktop' equivalent, and I mean with the same processing capabilities. The stupidity is that you usually need a 'mobile' motherboard as well, since the processors are packaged differently. I've been meaning to write a more comprehensive guide on this topic some day.

Re:Sleep != Hibernate

[cpghost]

Yep, you're right. Norway is in a remarkably good position w.r.t. home-grown natural energy (and it's a wonderful country as well!). But perhaps it's also because of lower taxes there? Electricity is one of the most surtaxed energy in some European countries. E.g.: in Germany, they're surtaxing electricity bills to provide funding for small alternative energy providers. It's good intentioned, but that's how you get to EUR 0.25/kWh...

Re:Sleep != Hibernate

[repvik]

Those prices include 25% VAT, which I think is pretty high in itself. In addition, almost EUR 0,02 goes to the state as a "usage tax".

Re:Sleep != Hibernate

[mcvos]

I built a new system in July, Intel Core2Duo E8400, 2gb ram, ATI 3850, two hds (one's a raptor), and the box on idle pulls 81W.

I still think 81W is too much for doing nothing at all. Problem is, there are a lot of invisible energy wasters in a PC. I believe an E8200 idles around 3W and a HD3850 around 10W (I have them too), but memory and motherboard use a lot of power too, and each harddisk adds about 10W.

The most useless power wasters are graphics cards. I believe the 8800GT uses about 100W just to draw an empty desktop. Recent ATI cards are a lot better, but 10W is still a lot for drawing a desktop.

Well, at least I'm glad manufacturers are starting to pay attention to this.

Re:Sleep != Hibernate

[mcvos]

OK, I have a stupid question. How do you tell how much power a component is going to pull before you buy it?

I think Tom's Hardware has some articles on CPU power per Watt. Beyond that, check out Silent PC Review. They're goal may be silence, not energy, but wasted energy means extra heat, more fans and more noise, so they do give a lot of attention to energy efficiency.

Re:Sleep != Hibernate

[Toll_Free]

You're reversing something to fit your argument.

Problem still remains. Baseline power. 200 dollars a year still adds up to slightly less than 20 a month.

10 percent power savings, if everyone did, would add up tremendously.

Not to mention the fact that if everyone dropped baseline power demands off peak, then our nuclear needs (and hydroelectric and others) would drop a LOT.

Disclaimer, I live in the (as I know it) biggest wind driven city in the US (world??)

--Toll_Free

Re:Sleep != Hibernate

[Toll_Free]

Really? I suggest you learn to look and read your electric bill, or actually state some facts from our side of the pond.

Because over here, your penalized for the more electricity you use.

I know, just went through this with So Cal Edison for my medical devices. I just increased my baseline power by 300%, and my bill dropped by about 50 percent.

Guess I'm wrong, though. Oh wait, maybe it's because your comparing gas to electric.

--Toll_Free

Re:Sleep != Hibernate

[MrSteve007]

Dell Precision T7400 w/ 1kw power supply - 8 core xeon 3.2 1600 FSB, RAID 1 15k SCSI drives, 8 gigs of ram, 1.5 gig quadro 5600 with dual 24" monitors. Without rendering anything, it currently consumes 320 watts and under load consumes 420 watts.

Not exactly a consumer based system, but we do 3D CAD architectural design, and time is money. The whole office of these machines, when running under load, very quickly raises the temperature a couple degrees each hour. We lovingly call them our 'knee warmers' because the undersides of our desks get quite hot.

Re:Sleep != Hibernate

[cpghost]

Uh yes, 25% VAT is really high, and I really hope Norway would find a way to lower it somewhat. In Germany, the electricity price tag above includes 19% VAT after the last 3% VAT increase...

For mere mortals there is speed

[houghi]

I lock my PC at the evening and turn off my monitor. Shutting down takes 5 minutes. Starting up takes 15 minutes. Just checked those time this morning to talk about it to IT. This does not include logging into the remote system with Citrix that takes another 10 minutes.

So the company has a choice.
1) Pay me (and everybody else in the company) 20 minutes
2) Pay the electricity for not turning of the PC
3) Find a solution that makes it possible to do all of this faster.

Oh. The only reason we use Citrix is to run Outlook in it.

Re:For mere mortals there is speed

[icebrain]

Fifteen minutes to start up?! What the heck are you running on there?

We can cold-boot into XP with novell, start Notes, Catia, Enovia, and everything else in less than five. Ten after a power outage and the server connection needs to be reestablished.

Re:For mere mortals there is speed

[youngerpants]

Option 3 looks good to me.

"Oh. The only reason we use Citrix is to run Outlook in it."

Outlook Web Access (OWA). There, I've just saved you 10 minutes per day, or around 60 hours per year. I don't know how many members of staff your company has, but if you're using Citrix, I'd imagine quite a lot... lets say 500.

500 x 60 = 30000 man hours per year saved by switching on OWA and NATing port 443.

Re:For mere mortals there is speed

[Number6.2]

What are they running? Corporate Crippleware: Safe Boot. Virus Checkers. Keyboard Loggers (Hi, guys!). After a few "Regime Changes" it all adds up...

Re:For mere mortals there is speed

[afidel]

Um, your computer is way underpowered or your IT department sucks because 15 minutes to boot in crazy. I have an old T42 with a 4200 rpm HDD and it only takes about 5 minutes to boot and that's with multiple server type services installed (I have two copies of MSDE installed if that tells you anything). Also Citrix logon times at my shop are ~90 seconds average and they will be more like 30 once I get the users profiles onto a faster file server.

Re:For mere mortals there is speed

[modmans2ndcoming]

lots of companies have lazy desktop admins who write one giant script to run that checks every resource available in the system for every user even though most of those users will not use most of the resources it is checking for. Smart companies have created multiple scripts and figured out smart ways to quickly identify what scripts the logging in user needs to run, thus reducing boot up significantly.

Re:For mere mortals there is speed

[RMH101]

It's possibly a combination of the two. My old work laptop (Tosh Centrino, 1.6 or 1.8GHz, 1GB RAM, Win2K) used to take around 12 minutes to boot from cold. Quite a bit of this is due to the Pointsec full disk encryption software, followed by SAV, followed by the usual corporate crippleware. Horrible. In the end it became a tethered desktop as I couldn't be bothered taking it anywhere.

Re:For mere mortals there is speed

[swb]

But OWA has a much thinner feature set, and over time, they will spend more time using OWA than waiting for Citrix.

Re:For mere mortals there is speed

[Bobfrankly1]

You must be the guy who bought my old 386 66. You need to hit the turbo button to get it to boot faster!

Re:For mere mortals there is speed

[darkstar949]

Most likely it is corporate-crippleware. My computer takes about 3 minutes to boot from cold to the Windows desktop, but because of all of the "utilities" that are loading and doing stuff, there is another ten minutes before the machine is actually usable.

Re:For mere mortals there is speed

[UncleTogie]

You must be the guy who bought my old 386 66. You need to hit the turbo button to get it to boot faster!

At that clock speed, you meant "486", didn't you?

BTW, I'm curious why the article's first point doesn't even touch on thermal expansion/contraction...

Re:For mere mortals there is speed

[Bobfrankly1]

My 386 ran at 66 with the turbo. It was really a 386 33, but really, who ever left the turbo button off outside of a few 'tards?

Re:For mere mortals there is speed

[RMH101]

hey, why did I get modded funny?

Re:For mere mortals there is speed

[mcgrew]

Are you in the next cubicle? The machine on my desk used to come up FAST and shut down fast (as long as there weren't a lot of running programs and open files to shut down), and recently the machine got BOG SLOW. I'll hit the power strip, go make coffee, clock in, get ice in my glass, then to the other end of the buiding for water, eat breakfast, and I'm still waiting for the damed thing to finish booting.

I blame the BSA (and not the boy scout bsa either, smartasses)

Re:For mere mortals there is speed

[mcgrew]

BTW, I'm curious why the article's first point doesn't even touch on thermal expansion/contraction...

Perhaps because the author wasn't really knowledgable about the subject?

Re:For mere mortals there is speed

[UncleTogie]

My 386 ran at 66 with the turbo. It was really a 386 33, but really, who ever left the turbo button off outside of a few 'tards?

Uh, those of us that built those systems.

The number shown on the front of darn near 99% of those boxes was set by seating/reseating a few jumpers. It never really did anything on most mobos, not even being connected in most cases, but it sure made the rest of the world see a "difference" in speed by toggling the higher number to display.

Reminds me of a band I know. They have an elderly regular that ALWAYS asks them to "turn it down" after the first set. They just pretend to move the knobs, and the poor schlub never knows the difference...

Re:For mere mortals there is speed

[Bobfrankly1]

The number shown on the front of darn near 99% of those boxes was set by seating/reseating a few jumpers. It never really did anything on most mobos, not even being connected in most cases, but it sure made the rest of the world see a "difference" in speed by toggling the higher number to display.

I've heard the jumpers setting the number thats appear on the displays bit before, but not the turbo button not even being hooked up bit. However, on this particular 386, the turbo proved it's differences, especially showing in boot times and pkzip compression, not to mention the X-wing and Tie Fighter games.
Man, that takes me back....

Re:For mere mortals there is speed

[toddestan]

If they have something like Symantec Anti-virus on there, that'll do the trick as it seems to love to grind the disk for a good solid 5-10 minutes after booting. A high-end machine doesn't help either, as the thing ties up the disk the whole time so nothing loads (well, maybe a SSD would help). It's even worse if they are still on Windows 2000, as it makes W2K's already slow boot take excruciatingly long.

Re:For mere mortals there is speed

[mollymoo]

It never really did anything on most mobos, not even being connected in most cases, but it sure made the rest of the world see a "difference" in speed by toggling the higher number to display.

When the first machines with Turbo buttons (whose purpose was of course to slow the machine down, not speed it up) appeared people certainly would have noticed if they didn't work, because their older software written specifically for a slower CPU would have run ridiculously fast.

Re:For mere mortals there is speed

[Qalthos]

Schadenfreude?

Questionable grasp on the problem space.

[Anonymous Coward]

Myth No. 3: The power rating (in watts) of a CPU is a simple measurement of the system's efficiency.
Fact: Efficiency is measured in percentage of power converted, which can range from 50 to 90 percent or more. The AC power not converted to DC is lost as heat...Unfortunately, it's often difficult to tell the efficiency of a power supply, and many manufacturers don't publish the number.

I'm not sold on taking advice who doesn't understand the difference between the wattage rating of a CPU and the wattage rating of the power supply. They're completely different components.

Re:Questionable grasp on the problem space.

[Vagnaard]

CPU , PSU are near. This might have been an abbreviation error.

Still , shame on them for not editing their stuff properly (If they meant PSU)

Re:Questionable grasp on the problem space.

[Anonymous Coward]

I like how this plays with the following assertion filed under "Myth No. 9: Going to DC power will inevitably save energy."

"New servers have 95 percent efficient power supplies, so any power savings you might have gotten by going DC is lost in the transmission process."

So, when it suits his argument, power supply efficiencies range from 50-90% efficency, and are kept hidden by manufacturers. Then, when that doesn't suit his argument, all of a sudden power supplies are at least 95% efficient, and everyone knows that.

I call shenanigans!

Re:Questionable grasp on the problem space.

[gmack]

Myth No. 9: Going to DC power will inevitably save energy.
Fact: Going to DC power entails removing the power supplies from a rack of servers or all the servers in a datacenter and consolidating the AC-DC power supply into a single unit for all the systems. Doing this may not actually be more efficient since you lose a lot of power over the even relatively small distances between the consolidated unit and the machines. New servers have 95 percent efficient power supplies, so any power savings you might have gotten by going DC is lost in the transmission process. Your savings will really depend on the relative efficiency of the power supplies in the servers you're buying as well as the one in the consolidated unit.

This is completely wrong. The author missed out on two of the three power conversions that take place in a data center. Data center UPS units take the AC current convert to DC then back again just so the server can convert it back to DC. Even if you have 95% efficiency at each stage the conversion losses will add up.

People wouldn't be going DC if it didn't result in measurable power savings.

Re:Questionable grasp on the problem space.

[Penguinoflight]

Didn't they learn you that the CPU is the big box with the blinkin' lights?

Re:Questionable grasp on the problem space.

[Guysmiley777]

It's called 'moving the goalposts'. It's like the author decided he was going to write about how wrong everyone was about power usage in computers, then found out that the myths were actually correct.

Oops.

Re:Questionable grasp on the problem space.

[aaarrrgggh]

With the US power system, you do avoid four high loss (DC:AC or AC:AC) power conversions and replace them with two lower loss (DC:DC) conversions. But, compared to the ROW electrical systems, you only save two AC:AC conversions which will just gain you two points or so.

I like 600VDC as a solution, but it will only work well for the biggest consumers where you can justify a significant increase capital cost with the energy savings. It's nice to have a single 4.8MW critical power bus (with a couple spares)-- makes load management much easier and reduces space requirements significantly.

Re:Questionable grasp on the problem space.

[SuperQ]

But all machines do that anyway. Ram runs at 1.5V or 1.8V, the CPU runs at 1.2ish these days. Where does that come from? 3.3V or 5V rails..

This is why people are moving everything to the 12V rail on the PSU (ATX12V standard and other ideas) A single efficient conversion with a local on-board conversion is best.

DC power still has a lot of other issues.

Re:Questionable grasp on the problem space.

[evilviper]

Data center UPS units take the AC current convert to DC then back again just so the server can convert it back to DC. Even if you have 95% efficiency at each stage the conversion losses will add up.

There's only 2 stages in there that are affected. You aren't going to get DC from the power company.

And while the final stage is affected, since the servers are getting DC at lower (48V?) voltages, do you really think a DC power supply is possibly going to be any more efficient than an AC one? Just because the input/output numbers are closer together doesn't mean your saving energy...

The only thing you're saving is having to convert from the batteries, to AC. Well, I've done some research on DC inverters, and I have to tell you, the best top-out at 97% efficiency... So, now you're saving just 3% by going DC.

But, you're also going to need larger, more expensive power lines (bus bars) to all the servers, and even with them, you can still expect to have more line losses than you would with relatively tiny ~240V AC wires.

And even if there were no line-losses, you've still got to make-up for the cost of investing in this new system. At well under 3% energy savings, it's going to take a LONG TIME at best.

People wouldn't be going DC if it didn't result in measurable power savings.

Companies rolling out DC datacenters are very few and far between. It's probably safe to say they are all just left-overs remnants that were in the works back when AC power supplies were hovering around 60% efficiency (because nobody had complained yet), and simply couldn't practically be stopped and reworked in time, once the very high efficiency AC power supplies came around.

If you know of any companies that have just started planning a DC datacenter today, point them out. I would certainly like to find out their reasons.

Re:Questionable grasp on the problem space.

[compro01]

95%+?! the BEST I have seen is about 87%, and I'm pretty sure they're playing games with the temperature to get that rating.

Re:Questionable grasp on the problem space.

[initialE]

If I remember correctly, the power savings is not in using AC or DC, it is in stepping up the voltage so that less current flows, resulting in lower power loss due to the innate resistance of the lines, a process that is possible using either AC or DC. Tesla and Watt fought over that one, comparing the relative safety of AC vs DC, a war of pure FUD IIRC.

Re:Questionable grasp on the problem space.

[Intron]

#3 is misleading for another reason. It doesn't matter whether power is "inefficiently" consumed by the power supply or "efficiently" consumed by the CPU, it all ends up as heat. Only the total wattage matters for power consumption.

Re:Questionable grasp on the problem space.

[nschubach]

Perhaps the wrong place to ask, but:

Does anyone know of an inline battery backup system that can be used on 12VDC devices like say... Linksys Routers? (Wall AC -> Transformer -> battery -> router) I've been looking for a solution to keep my router online without having to get a UPS to burn energy on conversion and charging DC batteries, then converting it back to AC for the adapter, then back to DC for the router.

Also, I wondered if anyone knew of a DC Power supply for PCs that would run off a (or the same) 12V DC battery array for the same purpose of avoiding AC -> DC -> AC -> DC conversions.

This of course would be for home use. This article (and the proposition of moving servers to DC source) seemed the fitting place to inquire to my IT brothers and sisters. Googling for these types of things can really be a pain! I did find solutions where people use tank batteries to power HAM transmitters though. ;)

Re:Questionable grasp on the problem space.

[aiht]

Tesla and Watt fought over that one, comparing the relative safety of AC vs DC, a war of pure FUD IIRC.

A correction there: the FUD war was mainly Edison (DC) and Westinghouse (AC), although Tesla was involved on the AC side (he did a lot of the technical stuff).
Watt is actually famous for his work on steam power, not electricity.

Re:Questionable grasp on the problem space.

[mollymoo]

I've been looking in to the same thing for my server "room" (it's actually a small wicker basket). You might be interested in PSUs designed for Mini-ITX car PCs, which would work for your proper PC, but could also provide 12V out for the Linksys. If you're running from a battery, you do need a PSU designed for car use. The "regular" 12V ones may not work with the low voltage from a draining battery, or the high voltage from a charging one. I intend to use one of those, a battery and a power supply to run my NSLU2 and its USB hard drive, plus my ADSL and WiFi routers.

Single page

[gnick]

Sorry for the thread hijack, but I decided to post this link as soon as I saw the links to all 4 pages of the top 10 list.
http://www.infoworld.com/archives/emailPrint.jsp?R=printThis&A=/article/08/10/06/40TC-power-myths_1.html

Re:Single page

[Anonymous Coward]

Nonetheless, it's off topic to what we're discussing in this thread. Pretty much anyone can click the 'print' button that's on the article itself. Way to go with the karma whoring though.

Re:Single page

[electrictroy]

Posting a link to an ad-free webarticle is the same as stripping commercials & distributing a tv show. These ad-based websites only survive because of advertising revenue, and if folks like yourself turn that revenue to zero (via adfree links), then you'll drive the website to bankruptcy.

>>>Power cycling healthy electronics is not a source of stress.

I disagree. It's not as bad as power-cycling your car, but can still shorten the lifespan. A car held in a steady state (never turned off and/or constantly driven) can go a million miles, easily. But a car that's turned on-and-off frequently might only last 100,000 miles before the engine starts rusting-out.

Likewise electronics in a thermal steady state will last millions of hours. Cycling any device through extremes of temperature, voltage, current is going to stress the part & shorten its life.

Re:Single page

[mollymoo]

The printer-friendly version isn't ad-free, it's sponsored by HP. I agree with the sentiment though.

Re:Single page

[taosk8r]

THaNk You!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Printfriendly FtW!

Debunk this

[sargeUSMC]

Taking ten suppositions and making suppositions about those suppositions (I'm getting dizzy) is not debunking. All I see here is lots of questionable, completely unattributed information. For example: "The average 17-inch LCD monitor consumes 35 watts of electricity". Really? Where did this information come from? Did you pull this information from the glossy for a 17" monitor? Did you just test your monitor? Did you test a large sample of monitor's here? Did you pull this information from a study? Out of your ass?

Re:Debunk this

[Penguinoflight]

At the risk of sounding like an idiot, that is a fairly accurate guess for 17" lcds (TN panels anyway).
Since pretty much all 17" lcds are TN rather than high-contrast panels, it doesn't really hurt to generalize.

Power ratings on monitors aren't like the ratings on computer power supplies. By effectively estimating average and peak power draw the manufacturer can save money. If the AC adapter is rated to handle too little power, the adapter or monitor will prematurely fail. If the adapter is rated too highly, the vendor just wasted a few cents.

Re:Debunk this

[halcyon1234]

They have a 17" monitor up their asses? Well, good to know goatse guy is getting steady work these days, even if he isn't well-versed in the scientific method.

Re:Debunk this

[thepotoo]

Huh? I agree that this article was short on facts and long on suckage, but how about you test your LCD right now?

Back when I was considering upgrading to an LCD, I tested around 20 LCD monitors using my Killawatt, and they all come up somewhere around 30-50 watts. That was a while ago, I bet they're better now. CRT's OTOH, are pretty variable, pulling anywhere from 50-120 (and I imaging quite a bit more for a really large one).

One "myth" I was hoping to see debunked here is that it's more efficient to upgrade to an LCD: this is only true if you run your monitor 24/7 and your current monitor is broken. I only have my monitor on about 3 hours a day on average, so it would have been just plain bad for the environment to throw out my, perfectly good, saved-from dumpster, 10-year old, 22" CRT for a $150 dollar LCD that uses half the power (remember manufacturing and disposal costs).

Re:Debunk this

[toddestan]

A lot depends on the brightness setting of the monitor, for both CRTs and LCDs (assuming the brightness setting of your LCD adjusts the brightness of the bulb, which is true for most of them nowadays). 30-50W is about right for a 17" LCD. CRTs tend to dim with time, so their power usage gradually increases, assuming you turn up the brightness to compensate. LCD backlights are also supposed to dim with time, but I haven't noticed that yet, except in cases where it dimmed right before it failed completely.

And your right about the power usage argument, I tried running the numbers hoping that I could argue that my LCD would pay for itself. It would have taken something like several years of 24/7 use for that to happen. Generally it seems to be best to squeeze the most life out of existing hardware no matter the efficiency than to run out and replace it with something else because it uses less power.

Re:Kitteh pr0n

[rugatero]

Show them some nice pictures of kittens. Or some pr0n.

I, for one, was very relieved to see the word or.

Not only that.

[khasim]

We have a similar problem here that I've not been allowed to fix yet.

The employees typically turn on their computers and then LEAVE THE OFFICE to get Starbucks coffee or whatever. A 10 minute wait turns into 30 minutes of non-productivity.

The computers should be the same as the phones. Instant on - any time - every time.

Re:Not only that.

[modmans2ndcoming]

get computers that suspend to flash. Then you can turn it on and it instantly is working with a nice little unlock screen.

Re:Not only that.

[PitaBred]

Wow. That's insane... my laptop that has about 2GB of RAM used at any given time because of our massive Java server that starts up every time I boot only takes 40 seconds to start up. There is no excuse for a 10 minute boot time.

Re:Not only that.

[againjj]

Your phone is instant on? I have a RAZR V3 (hate it), and it takes a good 30 seconds to boot. That's longer than my two oldest computers.

Re:Not only that.

[spikedvodka]

Obligatory http://xkcd.com/479/

Power

[Windows_NT]

Turning off your computer is always a good time to give the hamsters food and water, lets them rest, so in the morning your computer will be nice and fast. If it takes parents computer 15 minutes, his hamster need less weight

Did I miss something?

[Taibhsear]

Did the definitions of 'fact' and 'debunk' change recently? Every 'myth' listed has 'fact' under it proving it is true. According to my good friend Mr. Webster this is called 'confirmation.'

Re:Did I miss something?

[camperdave]

Yes, they've been redefined by Messrs Hyneman and Savage. Basically, if something takes a ridiculous amount of effort to blow up, then it is debunked, or "busted". If it blows up without too much provocation, it is "confirmed". If it merely catches fire, it is "plausible".

Re:Did I miss something?

[thepotoo]

Fact: Mr. Webster is only slightly more reliable than Wikipedia, and indeed much less authoritative than 6th edition of the Hitch-hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which was one of the first sources in the universe to discover that things could be made true simply by prefacing them with the word "Fact:"

Re:Did I miss something?

[Culture20]

And if it is exploded perfectly straight up and made of lead, then it's all three.

Re:Did I miss something?

[sargeUSMC]

Well, based on the article (ie, "facts" without proof), and your logic, I can thus put forward, without review, or the need for evidence:

Myth: I am not God.
Fact: I am God.

So, given that my "myth" has a "fact" listed under it, by your logic, it must be so.

Or, back to reality, the definitions that *our* good friend Mr. Webster has for "fact", "myth", and "confirmation" haven't changed, but instead, the problem here your misunderstanding of "unproven and unattributed statement somehow equals fact."

Loving Myth #2 tip...

[PinkyDead]

If you have a shit system that's really slow and badly written display the following:

"The sub-optimal response you are experiencing will soon be resolved as we are utilising quantum replicators to produce more server hardware for your request. Once complete we will travel back in time and resubmit your request. Thank you for using One-Born-Every-Minute hosting. Have a nice day."

(Speaking from experience - different text, same message).

You mean ...

[khasim]

... something like monitoring system usage and bringing additional boxes up when usage hits something like 80%?

And then suspending boxes when usage drops down to 10%?

All in all, trying to maintain a level 50% utilization level? Maybe with the utilization level setting being an option that the sysadmin could change?

I'd recommend you patent that idea.

Re:You mean ...

[Nursie]

I'd reckon IBM and VMWare probably have that lot wrapped up already. Still, there's no reason (given current record) that you couldn't have one as well.

Re:You mean ...

[Sobrique]

Actually you're pretty close with VMware at the moment - VM instances can be 'hot' migrated, so you can clump them up on one server, power the rest down, and fire them up/migrate when demand shows. Your response won't be great, but at least you will be able to respond to dynamic load fluctuation.

Actually VM tech goes a long way to doing that anyway, provided you've a vaguely good concept of workload fluctuations.

Some things conveniently left out

[storkus]

1. Spinning up and down hard drives: as discussed in plenty of places, including here on /. I believe, you can dramatically reduce the life of drives when you cycle them due to mechanical wear-and-tear. Laptop drives are designed for a lot more cycles because they're intended for this, but if you do it constantly even they'll die sooner or later. Server and desktop drives, OTOH, will die MUCH sooner. Is it really worth some extra power in a server farm in exchange for dying drives and their associated cost, including the increased possibility of data loss?

2. LCD Backlighting: Same as above--cycling power on any kind of discharge lamp dramatically reduces its life. And while LED backlighting is VERY efficient, AFAIK there are still major issues with color rendering--if there weren't, we'd be replacing regular lighting with them left and right. There's also the cost problem, particularly with the looming major shortage of gallium and indium. I think the only reason people don't talk about it more on laptops is because they're considered to have such a limited life expectancy since they're not expandable; now that desktop monitors are becoming more ubiquitous, I think we'll be seeing more talk about it.

3. SSDs: Their disadvantages have been talked to death here and elsewhere.

Mike

Re:Some things conveniently left out

[alienw]

Spinning up and down hard drives: as discussed in plenty of places, including here on /. I believe, you can dramatically reduce the life of drives when you cycle them due to mechanical wear-and-tear.

Do you have any data on this? This is one of those commonly held beliefs that has absolutely no facts behind it. I've seen a google whitepaper that pretty conclusively debunked commonly held assumptions that drives fail because of temperature and "wear and tear". From a mechanical standpoint, this belief also does not make any sense. The only wear components in a hard drive are bearings on the head and spindle. Spinning down the drive should prolong their life, rather than shortening it.

Re:Some things conveniently left out

[petermgreen]

LCD Backlighting: Same as above--cycling power on any kind of discharge lamp dramatically reduces its life. And while LED backlighting is VERY efficient, AFAIK there are still major issues with color rendering--if there weren't, we'd be replacing regular lighting with them left and right.
Actually while the weired spectral characteristics of LED lighting are a bad thing for general lighting they can be a good thing for backlighting a monitor. For a monitor you want a spectrum with peaks corresponding to the primaries you are trying to mix. The closer the three pixel components are to pure spectral colors the wider the gamut of colors your monitor can display.

Re:Some things conveniently left out

[petermgreen]

I saw the google whitepaper and it debunked very little about the temperature "myth", not sure about wear and tear.

With regards to tempreature the study had a couple of fundamental flaws.

* The temperature measurements came from the drives themselves. That means if say an unreliable hard drive model also underreported it's tempreature it would totally skew the results.
* It was data from servers running in a well cooled datacenter. That means there was virtually no data about drives running at the kind of tempreatures you see in a poorly ventilated desktop in a hot room.

Re:Some things conveniently left out

[Olivier Galibert]

One word: stiction. I don't know how modern drives are susceptible to it (I don't power them off if I can avoid it), but with old drives a poweroff was a kind of russian roulette. You never knew if the drives would spinup again or not.

    OG.

Re:Some things conveniently left out

[Frank T. Lofaro Jr.]

Is it really worth some extra power in a server farm in exchange for dying drives and their associated cost, including the increased possibility of data loss?

One could use RAID-1 to regain the reliability.

Re:Some things conveniently left out

[Just Some Guy]

This is one of those commonly held beliefs that has absolutely no facts behind it.

The data sheet for my Hitachi HDS721075KLA330 drive rates it at 50,000 load/unload cycles. If it powered up 50 times a day (which would be quite possible in a desktop with aggressive power savings enabled), it's specced to last about 3 years.

From a mechanical standpoint, this belief also does not make any sense.

The people who actually built it seem to disagree with you. Hint: a spinning hard drive takes little energy to stay in motion. A stopped hard drive takes quite a bit of torque to spin up to running speed in a small number of seconds.

Re:Some things conveniently left out

[toddestan]

That's actually a good reason to power the drive down often. Stiction is one of those problems that gets worse over time. If my drive spun up fine today and spun up fine yesterday, it's likely it will spin up fine tomorrow. If stiction rears its head, it will be fairly easy to coax the drive into working if the problem has just started, and I'll know to get a replacement asap. If the drive hasn't been spun up in a while, it's a total crapshoot whether or not it will work when it's powered up, whether it's been spinning the whole time or sitting on a shelf. Overall, I've lost more data from drives that have been left on all the time as opposed to drives that I regularly power down, as I can catch the "about to fail" drives when they start having trouble when I power them up.

Re:Some things conveniently left out

[alienw]

Hint: a spinning hard drive takes little energy to stay in motion. A stopped hard drive takes quite a bit of torque to spin up to running speed in a small number of seconds.

Hint: motors don't wear out because they produce torque. Magnetic fields don't wear out. So this still doesn't make much sense. And I'm not quite sure I believe the datasheet statistics -- that number was probably pulled out of someone's ass, just like the "50,000 hour MTBF" claimed by some other manufacturers.

Re:Some things conveniently left out

[Just Some Guy]

Hint: motors don't wear out because they produce torque.

Yeah, they really do. They aren't specced for spinning up, but for maintaining speed. There was a Slashdot article a while back about Ubuntu allowing drives to cycle too quickly. Check that out and follow some of the links for more information.

Savings ~= Storing

[ZeroNullVoid]

Why is using batteries, capacitors, or memory cells not considered power savers?

Isn't that their purpose...

(ignore the technicality of how most batteries are just an reaction generating power vs saving power)

Re:Savings ~= Storing

[fred fleenblat]

How much beer do you save by drinking it out of a mug instead of straight from a bottle or can?

Great Example of Datacenter Power Management

[autocracy]

Microsoft's Windows Messenger (MSN Messenger, Live Messenger... whatever they call it these days) Group wrote an awesome abstract of how they cycle servers on & off to handle the load while saving power.

Now, for reasons pointed out in other comments, TFA from Infoworld is a mix of good info and horseshit.

I'd Get Fired If I Followed These

[mpapet]

Myth #2 suggests making your customers wait. That might work in super-mega-corporate land where your customers are literally married to you and queues in Tech Support are "profitable."

I would *deserve* to be fired if I made a customer wait. Of course, that sense of urgency doesn't work in super-mega-corporate entities either.

The myth about going to DC to be more efficient is painful too. If a manager in a workplace would entertain a crackpot ideas like that, I'd leave.

Re:I'd Get Fired If I Followed These

[spidey3]

It is also not viable for time-critical applications. We lose customers when latency goes higher than 10 milliseconds! Waiting seconds for more capacity to come online is totally a non-starter for us.

Re:I'd Get Fired If I Followed These

[Rakishi]

The myth about going to DC to be more efficient is painful too. If a manager in a workplace would entertain a crackpot ideas like that, I'd leave.

So you are against any new innovations or non-standard ideas without even examining the claims behind them first...

Re:I'd Get Fired If I Followed These

[Fulcrum of Evil]

I guess you've never had to deal with a manager that gets a bug up their ass about something and applies it well out of where it should be.

Re:I'd Get Fired If I Followed These

[AK Marc]

So you are against any new innovations or non-standard ideas without even examining the claims behind them first...

You are assuming that he has not examined the claims behind that crackpot idea. DC is not practical. It takes all of 10 seconds of impartial research to discover that DC doesn't save money, and he made it sound like he's done that 10 seconds worth, and any manager that would suggest large intrusive changes based on the recommendations of a sales person over their technical staff without doing their own research is not someone that he would ever work for.

Re:I'd Get Fired If I Followed These

[Renraku]

Alright, so lets say you're the manager of a BigBoxRetail Co. store. You know peak hours are mid-day Saturday and mid-day Sunday.

You plan schedules accordingly.

Uhoh, its Saturday morning at 2am and a surge of people have come in. Since you only scheduled 4 register attendants, there's ten people in each line bitching about you. You deserve to be fired for making customers wait. Your decision has potentially annoyed a single customer. But corporate would NEVER allow you to fill up all registers 24/7, would they?

IT is the same way. In some ways, its worse! Imagine if your store only had 4 registers, total, and corporate wouldn't let you build more. Instead, they suggest you turn over some shopping carts and pull a scanner out of your ass, and hack a point-of-sale system out of it so you can have five registers, because they JUST bought you a new credit card reader system for each checkout! You're WAY over budget!

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[account_deleted]

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What do they mean by "suspend"?

[argent]

Suspend saves the state of the system to hard disk, which reduces the boot time greatly and allows the system to be shut down. Sleeping continues to draw a small amount of power, between 1 and 3 watts, even though the system appears to be inactive. By comparison, Suspend draws less than 1 watt. Even over the course of a year, this difference is probably negligible.

I though "suspend to disk" and "hibernate" were synonyms. A suspended computer shouldn't draw any more power than a computer that's turned off, because a suspended computer is off: you can pull AC and battery, ship it to Patagonia, plug it back in again, boot it from the hibernate image, and it shouldn't be able to tell it hadn't been on power the whole time.

Or is there some third level of "sleep" they're talking about here?

Re:What do they mean by "suspend"?

[Actually, I do RTFA]

Or is there some third level of "sleep" they're talking about here?

Kinda. What they are saying is that even with 0 load, the AC->DC adaptor still uses a bit of energy, so you have to actually unplug it to get the 1 watt savings. So, it's not the laptop per se that's using the energy, but what most people think of the adaptor as part of the computer, so included it is.

Re:What do they mean by "suspend"?

[Feanturi]

If you unplug a suspended system, you have lost whatever the system had been doing, and it will need to do a full bootup again once power is restored. "Hibernate" is the only sleep method that allows you to remove all power from the system, as it writes the contents of RAM to a large file on the hard drive, then does a full power-off of the machine. The file is quickly read back in all at once when you start back up again, registers and stack pointer restored, windows that were open with whatever contents, etc. "Suspend" just puts the computer into a low-power state where the contents of RAM is maintained live: you cannot remove the power cord without losing the state, hence the system continues to draw a small amount of power.

Re:What do they mean by "suspend"?

[argent]

They specifically referred to "suspend to disk", and drew a clear distinction between that and the "sleep" mode you're talking about.

Re:What do they mean by "suspend"?

[argent]

That makes sense, though I generally have the adapter and the laptop both in my backpack when I hibernate it.

They have their own fans...

[pmandryk]

My favourite story (or urban legend) is when an employee came in to an IT shop on the weekend and shut down all of the A/C cooling units for the Data Centre. He claimed that he was "going 'Green' and saving power" because "...all of those computers in that room have their own fans." I'm pretty sure he was let go after that...or promoted to management.

I remember why I don't read Infoworld

[sheldon]

That's a really bad article. Wow, worse then anything I remember them writing before.

Re:Debunking the debunkers

[Penguinoflight]

Don't apply for a job at Infoworld, your knowlege level is too high.

Bad article...

[Junta]

Out-right potentially wrong: no one cares if a customer is made to wait for a server to boot to get served. That's not a generalization to be made lightly... It is true, though, that suspend-to-ram has not received the attention it deserves in the data center. A great deal of server-class systems and options are not designed to cope with suspend-to-ram, and thus you must be careful banking on this. The industry should correct it, but a facility can't bank on it yet (just put pressure on your vendors to make it so...)

Straw-man: A supposed 'myth' that leaving on LCD monitors is fine for energy savings, with the remarkable clarification that being off saves more power... Who would have thought.

Other straw-man: You will unconditionally save money by rapid upgrades to the latest efficient technology. I don't think anyone is foolish enough to think compulsively following any technical treadmill will lead to any overall financial gain..

Re:Bad article...

[Volante3192]

Well, obviously leaving LCDs on saves energy if you compare it to leaving CRTs on.

Re:Bad article...

[Culture20]

I don't think anyone is foolish enough to think compulsively following any technical treadmill will lead to any overall financial gain..

Unless gasoline/petrol is involved.

Re:Bad article...

[dbIII]

It also depends entirely on the CRT. Some of the more expensive ones completly power down if there is no signal for a minute or so. To get them to turn back on you have to push the power button. Now of course these things are free gifts from places that migrate expensive CRT screens to LCD.

Re:Kitteh pr0n

[Hognoxious]

Not half as relieved as the cats were.

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Daylight Savings Time

[flyingfsck]

Probably the biggest and most annoying/disrupting power saving myth is Daylight Savings Time. Every year, the power companies announce that they don't notice any change whatsoever in power consumption.

Re:Daylight Savings Time

[Spykk]

It sounds like you need to tighten your tinfoil hat. Clearly the power companies say this so they can reap the rich rewards of an extra hour of artificial lighting.

Sod NFS

[Colin Smith]

Sorry, It's just not worth the pain. Boot to RAM.

You just set high and low load thresholds for server on/off. And a load balancer which simply adds the new server to the server pool when it notices it's there, removes them when it's gone. So no need to try to predict stuff.

5 seconds or 3 minutes, the server boot times are largely irrelevant. If you think you're going to handle a slashdotting you are mistaken, you can't handle oneoff events this way. You would have to go from 1 to 100 servers and connections in 5 seconds.

What it can do is grow really quickly if a service becomes very popular very quickly, or reduce your datacenter costs if it's typically used only 9-5. Or even, dual purpose processing. Servers do X from 9-17 and Y from 15-20.

 

Re:Sod NFS

[SanityInAnarchy]

If you think you're going to handle a slashdotting you are mistaken, you can't handle oneoff events this way. You would have to go from 1 to 100 servers and connections in 5 seconds.

A slashdotting lasts a fair bit longer than that. An Amazon EC2 instance can boot in maybe a few minutes, and that's the same whether you're booting 1 or 100. The same probably goes for any other "cloud" cluster.

In fact, I'm a bit surprised this (or just virtualization in general) wasn't mentioned. Rather than keeping a backup server powered up, or on standby/hibernate, or even sitting around off, unused, I can simply rent one from a service like EC2. When I'm done with it, it's not as though it's wasting power -- it gets reclaimed, and assigned to someone else who needs it.

Re:Sod NFS

[kesuki]

"5 seconds or 3 minutes, the server boot times are largely irrelevant. If you think you're going to handle a slashdotting you are mistaken, you can't handle oneoff events this way. You would have to go from 1 to 100 servers and connections in 5 seconds."

actually, it's not really that bad, do you think every slashdot reader loads all the article links in a story submission all at once? ever single slashdot user? no, it doesn't work that way, intelligent load balancing can respond in time. when an article is submitted to slashdot, traffic greatly increases along a nice curve, it's almost always the exact same type of curve. it's similar for any other site that suddenly gets popular from some news/review site.

and here's the thing, only a certain percentage of users are going to get error messages, etc, while load balancing is trying to catch up, even if there was a spike, and not a curve.

there is another nice trick to avoid error messages. bandwidth throttling. if your setup detects a huge spike in traffic, faster than the system can load balance you can set up automatic traffic shaping, to slow down requests until more servers can go online, so what people wind up with is a very slow loading page, until the traffic shaping is changed back to allow more traffic as more servers get online.

it's not rocket science surviving a slashdotting, and it doesn't require running 100 servers at 5% load 24/7/365.

High efficiency power supplies

[disordr]

In my latest batch order of servers (20 x 1U machines) I've got a config made up of: - intel xeon quadcore X3320 @ 2.5Ghz. These are the "efficient intel cores) - 4 x 2GB unbuffered ECC memory - 3ware 9690SA in RAID-10 with - 4 x Seagate SATA 500GB es.2 drives - high efficiency 280Watt PS while I haven't plugged them directly into a kilowatt meter, the first one I plugged into my metered APC unit showed it using .7amps at idle. Compared with some large honking 2U's with about double the power (2 x quadcores, 16gigs memory, 6 disks), these 1U systems use less than half the power rating as those larger machines. Overall this has been a big win in datacenter cost savings for our 20amp circuits which we get charged for monthly. I can get a bunch more machines on a single circuit.

Feeling it in the 1 Watt

[Doc Ruby]

That list of myths debunked seems pretty sensible, even in details that run counter to conventional wisdom. But even though the list properly cautions several times against how most any equipment left plugged in will still drain power while doing nothing useful (infinitely bad efficiency), the article still makes an inefficienty mistake:

Sleeping continues to draw a small amount of power, between 1 and 3 watts, even though the system appears to be inactive. By comparison, Suspend draws less than 1 watt. Even over the course of a year, this difference is probably negligible.

Over the course of a year, 2 unnecessary watts is 17.532 unnecessary KWh. Sure, that's only about $1.75 at about $0.10:KWh. But that's for each device. At home, in addition to sleeping computers, there's dozens of devices with AC adapters wasting watts most of the day (and night), which is possibly hundreds of dollars wasted. In offices and datacenters, possibly thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars a year wasted. And each KWh means loads of extra Greenhouse CO2 unnecessarily pumped into the sky, even if it's (still) cheap to so recklessly pollute.

Which is what the One Watt Initiative is designed to minimize. The US government has joined the global efficiency organization, mandating purchases of equipment that consumes no more than 1 watt in standby mode. Whatever the global impact of 3W wasted in standby can be cut by 2/3 if switching to 1W.

In the short run, that makes energy bills lower (and, by saving heat from standby devices, further lowers energy costs due to less required cooling). In the long run, we've got more fuel and intact climate left to work with - and that stuff just costs way too much to replace when it runs out.

Google

[Enderandrew]

Google developed their own power supply, and open-sourced the hardware, saying it saves them tons of energy and the rest of the world should use it. Mind you, it is DC, and it means a total DC data center, but really that isn't a bad idea.

Virtualization is also the way to go to save power. Fewer servers.

Re:Google

[Animats]

Google developed their own power supply

Actually, Google's point was that they wanted motherboards that ran on 12 VDC only. PC power supplies are still providing +12, -12, +5, -5, and +3.3v. Most of those voltages are there for legacy purposes, and DC-DC converters on the motherboard are doing further conversions anyway. So there's no reason not to make motherboards that only need 12 VDC. Disks are already 12 VDC only, so this gets everything on one voltage. This simplifies the power supply considerably, and avoids losses in producing some voltages that aren't used much.

But Google wasn't talking about using 12 VDC distribution within the data center. The busbars required would be huge at such a low voltage. They were talking about using 12 VDC within each rack. Distribution within the data center would still be 110 or 220 VAC.

Re:Google

[Fastolfe]

Virtualization is also the way to go to save power. Fewer servers.

This is only true if you run relatively few tasks that parallelize poorly. If you need to distribute many tasks that parallelize well across a cluster of machines, virtualization is just unnecessary complexity and cost. Also, the redundancy lost by consolidating servers may represent a higher cost than that saved by the lower energy consumption. But yes, for some, virtualization is the way to go.

Re:Google

[argent]

Virtualization is also the way to go to save power. Fewer servers.

Mostly because so many people use a desktop operating system for server work, and so have to use virtualization to get role and security separation between applications. I'm not saying that there isn't a point to virtualization on non-Windows platforms, but it's primarily Windows single-instance-per-computer service model that's driving virtualization.

A multiuser model, where you run multiple instances of an application over a single kernel, is much more efficient than virtual servers. It does require a modest amount of extra configuration to use multiple configuration files, directory trees, or chroot or jailed environments (depending on how well the application is written, and how much security separation you need), but if it reduces the number of servers you need isn't it worth it?

Re:Google

[PAjamian]

Disks are already 12 VDC only

Actually HDDs use +12v for the motors and +5v for the electronics. If you have a 3.5" FDD it only uses 5v. If you don't believe me try swapping the yellow (12v) and red (5v) wires going into the power connector on your HDD some time ... here's a hint, the smoke you see coming off the electronics isn't from putting 5v into something that expects 12v (note if you're really dumb enough to do this I won't be held responsible for ruining your HDD).

Re:LED backlit LCDs?

[pushing-robot]

LED backlit LCD monitors run in the $1,500+ range.

Really?

Damn, I need to get into your supply chain.

And A/C too?

[snspdaarf]

At one facility where I worked, a manager came in on a Saturday and found all the A/C in the building was on. Of course it was. It was almost 100 degrees outside. To save money, he hunted down every thermostat in the building and turned them off. There was no temperature monitoring. The servers in the top of the racks took it in the shorts. Almost every server in the machine room developed reliability issues and had to be replaced over the next year. But, because the manager was trying to do the right thing, and his heart was pure, he was only told he didn't need to worry about the A/C on weekends anymore.

Best way to save energy on web servers...

[staeiou]

Put articles on a single web page, instead of forcing me to click through three different "Next" links in order to get through an entire article. I understand if the article is one of those 5000 word New Yorker extended expositions, but I absolutely hate this trend in turning already short articles into even shorter multi-page articles. Single-page articles save energy, as well as my attention and patience.

Alos sounds like they may have roaming profiles

[Tran]

Turning on Roaming profiles and having a lot of crap on the desktop will affec this as well.

NiCd Laptop Batteries ("Myth #7") Huh?

[sirwired]

Tip number seven talks about battery conservation in LiIon vs. NiCd batteries. Um, laptops haven't used NiCd's in years. Their predecessors, NiMH hasn't been used in laptops in quite a while either.

Can you even buy NiCd's anymore, for any device? I can't remember the last time I saw them in an electronics store.

SirWired

Re:NiCd Laptop Batteries ("Myth #7") Huh?

[HannethCom]

I saw some NiCd AA Batteries at Walmart in the Halloween section recently, but no, like the rest of the article the information is useless.

Re:NiCd Laptop Batteries ("Myth #7") Huh?

[mpoulton]

Can you even buy NiCd's anymore, for any device?

Yes, you can still get NiCd batteries - and they are still the best choice for some applications. When managed well, they have a very long service life and are the best option for high-temperature environments with deep cycle needs or weight restrictions (thus making lead acid a bad choice). Field radios, generator starting batteries, and some test equipment are still current applications for NiCd.

Re:NiCd Laptop Batteries ("Myth #7") Huh?

[tcgroat]

Yes there still are NiCd batteries on the market, but they aren't popular for applications where NiMH batteries meet the needs. NiMH usually gives more A-Hrs in the same package compared to NiCd, at a comparable price. But NiCd is better for high peak current, cold weather use, is more tolerant of overcharge, and less toxic when it's disposal time. They're still sold in the US, but the RoHS regulations have banned them in most products sold in Europe.

Auto boot?

[Midnight Thunder]

The employees typically turn on their computers and then LEAVE THE OFFICE to get Starbucks coffee or whatever. A 10 minute wait turns into 30 minutes of non-productivity.

Or get a Mac. Although it you shouldn't need to go that extreme, one feature I have seen on Macs is the ability to auto boot at a certain specified time. If you know its going to take 10 minutes to be ready for use then get it to boot 10 minutes before your normal arrival time. The only question I have now is whether this feature is available in any non-Apple branded computers, and configurable via MS-Windows or Vista?

See the "Schedule Sleep or Shut Down" section at: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT2490?viewlocale=en_US

Re:Auto boot?

[Culture20]

I know that Dells have auto-power-on times in their BIOS and their BIOS can be configured by Dell apps in Windows, DOS, and portions of the BIOS in Linux.

Re:Auto boot?

[deroby]

Don't want to rain on your Mac-Love but I think Dell desktops & notebooks have had this feature since well before 1999, might have been earlier... I never had a look at a Dell BIOS before that time. It's probably something they added when ATX was introduced (which was ca 1995 according to wikipedia). Anyway, I'm guessing that there's plenty of other brands out there that have the same feature too...

Agreed, being able to set this via the OS seems a lot more user-friendly than going via the BIOS, but then again, how often will you change this ? And for all I know there might be utilities around to set it from within Windows or Linux too... not a clue, never needed it.

Re:Auto boot?

[toddestan]

Another solution would be to use the WOL feature that most computers have nowadays. That would have the bonus that you could manage it centrally rather than having to set up each computer individually and have the ability to easily change the settings for holidays.

On the other hand, if you're not going to use WOL, then one way to save power would be to reconfigure the computers to turn WOL off. I've never understood why so many computers have this feature enabled by default, wasting power when the computer is "off", when it is so rarely utilized.

air side economizer

[Authoritative Douche]

Intel recently did a study on how datacenters can be cooled using air-side economizers, saving up to 67 percent in energy costs on a 10MW room. This was unthinkable even a couple years ago but modern systems can handle heat a lot better so you are bound to realize some savings by bumping the temps up to 85-90 degrees.

Heat, or heat pump?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well I live in Canada, and most people I know use electric heating. Yes, central electric heating is great, and actually cheaper than oil around here. (Montreal area)

Putting aside the fact that burning hundred-dollar bills is a cheaper source of heat than oil these days, are you sure you're not talking about heat pumps (air conditioners that can run "backwards"?)

Heat pumps are by far the most efficient way to warm a building using electricity; everyone I know who uses "electric heat" actually has a heat pump that will switch over to resistance heat only as a backup.

Re:Heat, or heat pump?

[operagost]

You definitely want to know when they fall back to resistance heat. The heat pump failed in my friend's central air and he didn't notice, resulting in something like a $500 heating bill. He had to put the thermostat at about 55 degrees F for a few days until the unit was replaced.

Re:Heat, or heat pump?

[ericspinder]

Heat pumps are by far the most efficient way to warm a building using electricity; everyone I know who uses "electric heat" actually has a heat pump that will switch over to resistance heat only as a backup

Or if the outside temp falls below 30 degrees Fahrenheit, as heat pumps will not work below like 20 degrees. If you're in any place that gets below freezing for more than a couple of nights, what you want is a duel fuel system, heat pump with a gas furnace backup; That's what I just bought.

TROC

[clarkn0va]

Well I live in Canada, and most people I know use electric heating...(Montreal area)

To be fair, when snowraver1 said 'Canada', I think he actually was referring to Alan Fotheringham's 'TROC'(The Rest Of Canada), i.e., the unwashed masses outside of the 401 corridor.

Here in Alberta, as in much of western TROC, it's good old natural gas.

db

Re:Debunk this - monitors

[Krishnoid]

I remember using a Watts-Up meter on my 19' CRT a while back. When it went into power-saving mode (turning off the 'yoke', I think), it used under a watt of power. While technically true per the article that it will still use power until its unplugged, at that rate, ~30 systems set to put the monitor into power-saving mode would use the power of the single system where the employee forgot to enable it. At that point, I'd start looking elsewhere for power savings. Plus, you get the neat ka-bloing sound when you tap Shift to wake it up.

All the CRTs have built-in power supplies, unlike many external-transformer based LCDs nowadays which probably use more power when shut off.

Re:Kitteh pr0n

[againjj]

I don't know -- there are those who would like to see kitten pr0n.

Re:Debunk this - monitors

[Anonymous Coward]

The other benefit of a 19-foot CRT is that you can give free X-rays to the entire neighborhood. Think of the savings on health care!

Re:LED backlit LCDs?

[ekgringo]

I just bought an entire laptop (Dell Latitude E6400) with LED backlighting for less than that.

Canadian here

[phorm]

Lived in Interior BC (down to -38 on the odd occasion, dry cold though so it's not too bad if you're not in the wind) and now live in Toronto (last winter was >-30, not sure what the regular is, but it's a wet cold so it tends to "seep in" a bit more):

I had gas heat in BC, and I have hot-water heat in Ontario.

I've had electric before in BC as well, though. The power consumption depends on how you use it, among other things.

If you've good thermostats and adjustable base-heaters in a per-room basis, you can let them crank the heat down a lot at night in the larger but unused areas of the house, and then warm up in the morning. For the bedrooms, you can adjust to your own comfort level at night-time, but let them drop in times when you're in common areas. So the temperates around the house will see-saw depending on what rooms you need warmth in more, but you can adjust to conserve power while maintaining overall comfort.

Still, nothing's quite as nice as having a good efficient gas fireplace in the central area of the house, especially if *that* has a thermostat (my last house did). You can turn it down at night, but it sure heats up a room quickly and when you've got "cold-balls" from shoveling a few feet of snow, nothing beats sitting in front of the hot fireplace!

Re:Canadian here

[spikedvodka]

I see your "Nothing beats sitting in front of the hot fireplace" after shoveling a few feet of snow, and raise you a "Sitting [naked] in a nice hot-tub with your [wife/SO/etc.]"

Re:Canadian here

[phorm]

Damn. I forgot the hot-tub part, probably since I've never personally owned one (though I have relatives that do, I'd rather not think of the *naked* part).

I'd agree that a hot-tub is an improvement, provided that it has a warm path back to the house, otherwise the moment is somewhat broken when you have to get out and face the cold again (otherwise, outdoor hot-tub on a winter day is a winner). I suppose an indoor hot-tub/spa with a glass enclosure might be good as well.

Time to switch to Linux

[dorfsmay]

My experience with Linux on a laptop is that both hibernate (to disk) and suspend (to ram) work flaslessly.

You did not ask about resume, so I won't go there, ok I'll say this, it works very well after hibernate.

Triangle clock signal

[Bromskloss]

At the electronics lab where I hang out, there is a story about some guys who wanted to feed their processor a triangle wave clock signal instead of a square wave because "it contains less energy". People told them nothing good would come out of it, but they tried it anyway and nothing good came out of it.

Re:Debunking the debunkers

[wastedlife]

Excellent post, however:

LCD monitors certainly use non-negligible amounts of power, but their colors do change slightly during warm-up. The power savings from turning a display off do not outweigh the cost of a person waiting for the display to warm up.

This is only true if the person cannot use the display until it is warmed up(graphic design, for example). However, most people can continue to use office software or check email even if some of the colors are slightly off. The power savings from an office full of monitors being off outside of business hours should more than make up for the colors.

Re:Kitteh pr0n

[couchslug]

"Not half as relieved as the cats were."

THERE"S a "DO NOT WANT!" moment!

auto power up...

[DRAGONWEEZEL]

I had a dell w/ that feature, and I LOVED it! My computer and my coffee were ready for me every morning!

shenanigans by any other name

[DRAGONWEEZEL]

is still bs all the same.

pfft

[DRAGONWEEZEL]

I'm rainbow bright you insensitive clod!

Wrong!

[Spazmania]

Hibernate mode in XP saves the state of the system to RAM and then maintains the RAM image even though the rest of the system is powered down.

Wrong! Hibernate saves the state to disk and powers down. "Stand By" saves the state to ram and then keeps the ram powered while everything else turns off.

New servers have 95 percent efficient power supplies

Wrong! Only a few power supplies are more than 85% efficient and none of the normal Dells or HPs you buy top 90%.

Power cycling healthy electronics is not a source of stress

Wrong! Anything that causes a rapid change in temperature is a source of stress. The materials expand and contract and different parts expand and contract at different rates. It's no different than the winter/summer cycle cracking the sidewalk.

Battery life for either type of battery can be prolonged greatly by removing the battery when the unit is plugged into AC power.

True, but an incredibly bad idea. The battery stabilizes current from the relatively crappy power brick. It can't do that if it isn't plugged in. And a single crash due to a power failure is likely to cost you more in the cost of your very valuable time than all the electricity you might save. Tis better to designate one battery your "docked" battery and make sure that when you're not recharging your travel batteries, you only your docked battery is connected.

If customers need to wait while you spin up cold spares to handle rising workload, brag about it.

What kind of crack are you smoking, and why haven't you shared?

Re:Debunking the debunkers

[wastedlife]

I see, thanks for clarifying.

Re:Kitteh pr0n

[mcgrew]

As for the wait, people will stay on hold if they know their call will be answered.

I'm on a by-the-minute cell phone, you insensitive clods! Answer the goddamned phone for chrissakes!

Why is this 4 pages

[myth24601]

Why can't they display the dang article on one page rather than making me hit "next page" over and over. I know it's off topic but it's annoying in such a short article.

Running off AC

[argiedot]

Battery life for either type of battery can be prolonged greatly by removing the battery when the unit is plugged into AC power. This approach is recommended if your laptop supports it and power outages are infrequent in your area.

Is this true? Does anyone know of any sources for the differences in battery lifetime if you do this?

Re:Running off AC

[sznupi]

True - while modern LiIon batteries don't have any memory effect, they do "age" (starting right after they get off assembly line). And the hotter they are, the faster they do it (though there's also "too low" temperature for them AFAIK)

If you remove the battery, it ages slightly slower/no heat from laptop. OTOH it works as UPC, and supposedly also "smoothes out" spikes/etc.

Reasons to virtualize a production database

[Glonoinha]

Generally the database data would reside on a commercial grade SAN on real disks, not in a virtual disk.

Given that, and the server software running in a VM, you get :

100% uptime even in the face of hardware upgrades. VMware lets you migrate a running VM from one physical machine to a different physical machine without bringing down the running virtual machine.

Even if you're ok with bringing down the virtual machine, the ability to move the VM from one box to a new box without changing / reinstalling / doing ANYTHING - upgrade hardware to much faster hardware in about an hour with very little effort - and if you go from a single CPU box to a much faster single CPU box, you don't even pay licensing upgrade fees for 'per CPU licensing'.

Snapshots make replicating the environment to use in your DEV / TEST / PERF environments ... a snap. Just rename the server and use different data.

Ditto for Disaster Recovery.

Ability to provision multiple servers on a single physical box, effectively minimizing the impact of adding each additional machine on your environment (heat, space, electricity).

Ability to bring different virtual servers up / down on the same hardware, giving you much more flexibility on how you use your existing hardware.

Because it's FUN! (Yea I know - I need to get out more.)

Re:Reasons to virtualize a production database

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

VMs are no panacea. CEntralizing your servers means centralizing your points of failure - as many thousands of VMWare customers discovered last month. When your underlying hardware takes a dive, now you've not lost 1 server, but 2 or 4 or dozens.

Re:Reasons to virtualize a production database

[Fulcrum of Evil]

Ok, I can see virting a DB and leaving the SAN alone (assuming it tests okay), but all those other things are things you can already do with a DB - a DB is basically a virtual machine that holds data, and adding a DB to a server is a matter of a few commands to create the tablespace, extents, and all that crap and set up basic permissions.

Re:Not a bad article

[ScreamingCactus]

I don't know about all of those, but some of them were inaccurate enough to cause me to question the rest. For example, the author doesn't seem to know the difference between sleep and hibernation, and claims that when the computer is hibernating, it still draws power causing the AC/DC converter to stay warm, which is simply not true. The computer is completely powered off during hibernation, which I'm sure everyone already knows, and the heat generated in the converter is due to resistance in the converter and will occur as long as it's plugged into the wall, even if the DC side isn't plugged into anything.

I'm still laughing

[drScott2]

At the answer to myth number two. Anyone who can suggest something like that even in jest clearly has little IT background and even less future.

Debunked? More like refuted...

[KreAture]

Where is the research?
Where is the data?

Why did I bother?

[Kris_J]

Yet another article reinforcing my believe that any articles with a numeral in the headline, that are a list of stuff, all suck.

Re:True Energy Conservation Techniques

[toddestan]

Or don't have any common sense. If the computer uses twice as much power under load than when idle (on the high side, especially for an office machine), and it takes a long 15 minutes for the computer to start, you would be saving power by turning them off unless "overnight" is 30 minutes or less.

DC power systems

[DragonHawk]

I've always wondered why we don't see the IT industry adopting the telephone company model for power. Telcos run everything directly off a 48 volt battery plant. The batteries are continuously trickle charged. In a power outage, the batteries just stop charging for a little while. So you don't need a separate UPS with charger, inverter, and so on. You don't need separate surge protection -- the AC->DC conversion gives you more than adequate isolation. If it was a 12 volt battery plant instead of a 48 volt one, you've be able to build smaller, cheaper power supplies in the PCs, since you'd only need a 12->5 and 12->3.3 volt DC/DC conversion. Seems like a no brainer to me.

I guess voltage drop would be a concern (12 volt DC won't go too terribly far), but the telcos seem happy solving that problem with big ass bus bars; would the same work for PCs?

Is there something I'm missing?

Bad combination of software

[DragonHawk]

Um, your computer is way underpowered or your IT department sucks because 15 minutes to boot in crazy.

Symantec Anti-Virus Corporate Edition and Microsoft Windows Update after the MSKB 927891 hotfix seem to have some kind of pathologically bad interaction during/immediately-after startup, where the disk thrashes like crazy no matter how much hardware you have. The computer can be almost unusably slow for one to five minutes after boot. Microsoft blames Symantec, Symantec blames Microsoft, I get nowhere. Since we can't jettison Windows (oh, how much I'd love to), we're jettisoning Symantec at the end of our current contract, but that's still several months out. In the mean, we're just telling everybody to leave their PCs on. Nice, eh?

Absolutely

[Max Littlemore]

My experience with Linux on a laptop is that both hibernate (to disk) and suspend (to ram) work flaslessly.

That's my experience too. In fact it's so flasless, I wouldn't even know a flas if I saw one.

My Ubuntu laptop suspends and hibernates just fine. It never wakes up from hibernate, but it gets there perfectly... and without flas.

lol

[thatskinnyguy]

How about saving power by using lynx instead of a nice fancy graphical browser? Hell! I just did!

Ground Source Heat Pumps

[Colin Smith]

"Or if the outside temp falls below 30 degrees Fahrenheit, as heat pumps will not work below like 20 degrees."

Work all winter down to -20C.

 

Re:Kitteh pr0n

[Hognoxious]

Yeah, and it looks like they got mod points...

Hibernate still draining power

[LoonyMike]

Another aspect claimed by the article is that even with Hibernate there is still some power drain, altough below 1W.
I do know that my laptop had Wake-on-LAN turned on in the BIOS. After disabling it, I stopped noticing 1% or 2% missing charge after being hibernated for a couple of days without being plugged in.

Re:Permanent Energy Crisis???!!!

[fm6]

Attention! "Overratted" is not shorthand for "fuck you"!