What you should know about green IT

1) no contest, but then again it is pretty obvious.

2) that may be true, but how many of those fall in the 'hot spare' or backup server category ? I would guess quite a few of them, I only run 19 servers, but 3 of those are stand-by with databases replicated in real time and 1 is a backup server. Conceivably I could power cycle the backup server and only have it powered up when it is doing a backup but past experience has led me to believe that frequently power cycling machines is an excellent way to shorten their life spans.

3) Fair enough, virtualization can reduce your power consumption. A 65% reduction in server count through virtualization is mentioned, I've seen numbers between 20% and 90% in other articles on virtualization, it only is relevant if you are currently not using your servers to full capacity, and some things can not be virtualized effectively. You'll have to do some measuring before you can compute the impact this will have in your particular situation.

4) true, an even better way is to use a heatpump instead of regular AC.

6) DC supplies are more efficient, but in an existing datacenter the cost of running a complete new supply grid to save some energy is usually not worth it. If you're going to create a new datacenter from scratch and you have some control over the equipment that will be housed there then you should definitely look at this as an option. Beware though, you'll need two powergrids because not all gear is available with a DC supply option. I don't know what 'active current' is, where I'm from we call it 'alternating current'.

8 nice fact, it would be neat to get more information on this and on what sets google datacenters apart from the standard. We have google datacenter less than 10 kilometers from where I'm sitting, maybe I'll apply for a tour :)

11) I'm expecting the coming flash revolution to completely reverse that trend, and to end up with the CPUs as the biggest consumers, not the storage devices.

14) that may be true, but the trend is towards 'always on' technology. We'll have to find some median between being online 24/7 and power usage, a machine that throttles itself down aggressively when not in use would be ideal for the home.

15) depends very much on your price per KWh, where I live it would actually be more (assuming 100 watts of continuous consumption for your PC and screen it would cost you several 100 dollars per year to keep such a machine running all the time).

19 & 20) simply don't print stuff!! I've stopped printing stuff 10 years ago and if it wasn't for some of my customers still demanding printed invoices even our bookkeeping would no longer have a printer.

21) this is mostly an issue for the employers, and a matter of trust. The 'office' is still reckoned to be the most effective way to employ people, and until there is a giant change of attitude this will remain a problem.

Hmmm...

A numbered list!

Buzzword green!

Buzzword IT!

Actual article offer items of common sense, and items far from sense but close to a sales pitch.

Its amazing how many of these occur just because of the defaults that we set up in our technology.

I mean, the default activity with Windows is to go to screensaver mode. If it just slept as default, it would save millions of dollars in power consumption.

I didn't find I should've known much of this but there was the odd tidbit that was interesting; Such as the ~30% of servers in a study which were running at less than 3% load.

ccraigIW is a sockpuppet account for IDG.