October 2, 2012 at 1:43 pm
Good day,
I was just reading an article at NYT about power consumption at Data Centers which states that there was not much interst in reduction of electrical power consuption and becoming sustainable.
The article is here: [url= http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/23/technology/data-centers-waste-vast-amounts-of-energy-belying-industry-image.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0%5D http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/23/technology/data-centers-waste-vast-amounts-of-energy-belying-industry-image.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0%5B/url%5D
It seems the fear of being not available is so high, that everything runs at full power all the time if it is needed or not and wasting a lot of energy producing a quite negative environmental impact.
I am not an expert in Data Centers but it surprises me that it should not be possible to become greener AND availabe.
My company for example has an application which monitors if employees forgot to switch out their desktops. At home I scheduled power outages for my little Synology file server when I do not need it and configured the power saving settings.
I would be interested to hear from others what they are doing and if they think their IT could become greener and how. I think this is an important subject as we all have some sort of duty to preserve the environment and electrical power is not produced in a green / sustainable way in most countries (nuclear power, coal, etc). As a plus, reducing power consumption can save the company a lot of money.
brgds
Philipp Post
October 2, 2012 at 2:25 pm
One reason to keep servers running is that turning a computer on takes about as much energy as running it for 1-3 hours, because capacitors have to be charged up, etc. Windows "sleep mode" alleviates some of that, but only some of it. So, if a server might be needed in the next 3 hours, you're probably using less energy to leave it idling than to turn it off and auto-power-up or something like that. Even if you don't need instant-on availability.
Most modern CPUs, hard drives, etc., will go into a power-saving mode automatically if they're idle. Power-up from idle to full in that mode is trivial, both in time and energy overhead, so, again, leaving them on has a lower cost than many might think.
All that is ignoring the fact that the NYT routinely falsifies information to forward their marketing and political agenda. That's why trust of them is at an all time low, and their subscription/sales numbers are out the basement.
But modern computers, desktop or server or smartphone or whatever, are power-hungry. No question about that! Just look at the battery-time difference between an idle-on system like the Kindle (e-ink version, not the tablet) vs a computer like the iPad or Galaxy Tab or even the Kindle Fire.
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