Green IT

[Tingles]

Next big thing?

Compliance, assessments, datacentre power stuff, EU regulation...etc etc...

Any money innit?

[Spacecadet]

The big Co's have been pushing this for a while, I think IBM even had a TV advert for it.
All comes down to power and cost saving. the green stuff is just a nice bit of by-product PR

[wurzel]

Virtulisation? All the money that companies could save in consolidating their servers not to mention the reduction in carbon footprint. Maybe there would be grants available?

[DaveB]

As Space Cadet said, most big companies are already doing it to save money on power and support services.

The server guys here have just decided to turn the air con temperature in out data centers up to 21 deg c as the kit will still work quite happily with that as the ambient temperature. The air circulation is still sufficient to avoid hot spots and they are saving a good chunck of cash in the process.

Virtualization of servers and consolidation of kit into blade racks rather than multiple individual boxes all make a difference and has been pushed by vendors of quite a while now.

[Addanc]

Do you think there's a plan B in spraying vanilla desk tops green?

[VectraMan]

Something on the news the other day on how Iceland is pushing to rebuild its economy by becoming the world's green data centre. It makes some sense: an abundance of "green" geothermic energy to exploit, and the colder climate means less to waste on air con.

There's a lot could be done for green desktops. Like my Windows 7 machine that I can't stop chugging away at the hard disk. Why can't it load the OS into RAM and switch off the hard disks until they're absolutely needed?

[TimberWolf]

Something on the news the other day on how Iceland is pushing to rebuild its economy by becoming the world's green data centre. It makes some sense: an abundance of "green" geothermic energy to exploit, and the colder climate means less to waste on air con.

There's a lot could be done for green desktops. Like my Windows 7 machine that I can't stop chugging away at the hard disk. Why can't it load the OS into RAM and switch off the hard disks until they're absolutely needed?

Or store large read-only data or applications in Flash memory.

MySpace replaces disks with flash
Social networking site MySpace has replaced traditional server/direct-attach disk combos with flash memory cached servers to save space, energy, cooling and cost.

[VectraMan]

Or store large read-only data or applications in Flash memory.

I did wonder about getting an SSD as a system drive. Shame they're still so expensive.

But it shouldn't really be necessary. I have 4GB RAM in this machine, which I rarely need all of. As good as Windows 7 is, it seems to me Microsoft have missed a trick here. Where you have pleanty of RAM, the computer is left on, and power cuts are extremely rare, it makes a lot of sense for an OS to be able to operate completely out of RAM.

[AtW]

it makes a lot of sense for an OS to be able to operate completely out of RAM.

The way they designed Windows results in System Cache pushing out real data from memory, and if you switch off swap (like we do on our servers) in heavy memory usage scenarios some Windows failures occur because some of the kernel functions EXPECT memory to be allocated and can't fail nicely...

[Fishface]

what happens to the usable parts from recycled computers?