{"id":9023,"date":"2008-02-06T15:23:00","date_gmt":"1999-11-29T20:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/?p=9023"},"modified":"2008-02-06T15:23:00","modified_gmt":"1999-11-29T20:00:00","slug":"is-it-going-green","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/?p=9023","title":{"rendered":"Is IT Going Green?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Times are interesting when it comes to power consumption and hardware disposal.\u00a0 We’ve got all sorts of "green" concerns<\/a>.\u00a0 We’re got pressure to reduce our carbon footprints to reduce CO2 emissions.\u00a0 Even if you’re part of the GWB camp and don’t believe in CO2 related global warming then you can’t argue against the need to conserve resources, e.g. avoid wasteful trashing of hardware which contains precious (yes!) and toxic\u00a0materials.\u00a0 And even if you don’t care about your environment, I bet you care about your bank account.\u00a0 It is inevitable that we will see regulations tightening on the consumption of power and disposal of hardware.\u00a0 There will be costs for needless wastage.\u00a0 There’s some things we can do to limit our exposure here.\n<\/p>\n

I’ve previously mentioned<\/a> that you can recycle your old hardware.\u00a0 There are charities that will gladly take your old servers and PC’s, even those 8 year old ones, recondition them and send them off to the farthest reaches of the planet with Ubuntu Linux on them for use in charities and schools.\u00a0 Some charities will even securely wipe your hard disks for you.\u00a0 You can make sure you limit your risk here by using a free secure wiping tool like DBAN<\/a>.\u00a0 There’s a few advantages to using a recycling solution like this.\u00a0 You get to give your hardware away and probably take some sort of tax break.\u00a0 You get to dispose of your hardware for free.\u00a0 Normal legal disposal actually costs a bit of money these days and that’s likely to increase in price per unit.\u00a0 Finally, you get to feel good about doing something that will benefit someone in need.\n<\/p>\n

What about operating costs of current infrastructure?\u00a0 Hosting data centers have already started moving in the direction of a solution.\u00a0 Companies like IBM are making big claims about the power consumption and heat generation levels of their Blade servers.\u00a0 Think about this.\u00a0 You get a denser CPU per Rack U infrastructure, e.g. the HP C class can have 64 dual CPU servers (equivalent of\u00a0a 2 disk slot\u00a0DL360) in a 42 U rack.\u00a0 That’s less real estate being used.\u00a0 OK – it’s not all that much less but it sure is if you fill a row of racks.\u00a0 Power consumption over a long period is claimed to be reduced.\u00a0 That means you’re getting a lower hit from any potential carbon emission related charges.\u00a0 We all now that power costs are one of the big operating costs right now and that they are only going to get higher.\u00a0 Heat generation is a big concern too because it requires some sort of cooling mechanism which can consume a great deal of power.\u00a0 If you can reduce your server related heat then you can reduce that cost.\u00a0 Once you install an operating system onto your powered on blades, the do become pretty efficient.\u00a0 Just don’t get confused by standing behind a rack of powered on blades that don’t have an operating system.\u00a0 It can get pretty hot back there because there is no management software installed.\n<\/p>\n

Hardware virtualisation such as VMware Virtual Infrastructure (ESX, etc) or Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V also brings something to the table.\u00a0 Think about all of your servers.\u00a0 How many of them need all of the resources they have?\u00a0 Your only hardware bottlenecks are typically memory and disk.\u00a0 CPU is probably rarely above 10% on the majority of servers.\u00a0 Why not consolidate that resource and save on server real estate?\u00a0 Virtualise only those servers that are candidates.\u00a0 Don’t be fooled by some consultant into virtualising everything.\u00a0 I worked on a site where they did and their server services performance levels were horrific.\u00a0 A thing to consider here is tha your abstraction of hardware makes your virtualised servers mobile so hardware is not a concern during hardware failure (VMware VMotion or Windows 2008 clustering) and hardware replacement becomes easier.\u00a0 On the green side, you have less server hardware so you have less green related charges when disposing of server hardware.\u00a0 You’ve also got even denser server per Rack U installations which reduces real estate costs, power consumption and cooling related costs.\n<\/p>\n

We can take this a step further with Virtual Desktop Infrastructure.\u00a0 Why have 500 desktops when you can virtualise those onto 16 servers as virtual machines?\u00a0 You’ve not only reduced hardware ownership and disposal costs but you’ve also minimised those green costs too.\u00a0 Not to mention you’ve got a simple to manage and deploy infrastructure using solutions such as a VDI broker.\n<\/p>\n

IT staff of SME’s are reading this thinking "how the hell a I going to afford a blade and SAN infrastructure?".\u00a0 Simple … outsource!\u00a0 You don’t have to outsource your staff … just the hosting of your servers.\u00a0 You save in loads of ways.\u00a0 Look at the big room hosting your servers right now.\u00a0 It’s consuming lots of space and increasing your rent costs.\u00a0 You have to buy and maintain cooling and fire suppression systems.\u00a0 Why not share all those costs and\u00a0your new\u00a0blade and SAN infrastructure costs by outsourcing the hosting of your servers?\n<\/p>\n

I’ve probably given you a few things to think about there.\u00a0 Whether you like it or not, green related costs are going to increase.\u00a0 Acting now could prevent or minimise those cost impacts on your organisation.\n<\/p>\n

EDIT:\n<\/p>\n

I realised there was some more I could talk about on power conservation.\u00a0 We’ll never 100% remove desktops and laptops from the network.\u00a0 VDI isn’t for everyone either.\u00a0 We have all seen company emails instructing us to turn off our PC’s and monitors when we go home in the evening.\u00a0 Almost no one does it.\u00a0 If you have Windows Vista deployed then you can use group policy to manage power settings <\/a>of those machines.\u00a0 Consider that a desktop should be powered off 98 hours of the week then you can see how you might save some money by upgradig to Vista!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Times are interesting when it comes to power consumption and hardware disposal.\u00a0 We’ve got all sorts of "green" concerns.\u00a0 We’re got pressure to reduce our carbon footprints to reduce CO2 emissions.\u00a0 Even if you’re part of the GWB camp and don’t believe in CO2 related global warming then you can’t argue against the need to … Continue reading “Is IT Going Green?”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9023","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9023","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9023"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9023\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9023"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9023"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9023"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}