The up.time IT Systems Management Blog

Let’s face it, IT is not environmentally friendly.

The amount of petroleum alone used to create the plastic bits for hardware  is enough to send the average environmentalist to a stress induced early grave.   Add a dash of volatile compounds, sprinkle with some heavy metals and you have your average computer.  Some companies are starting to ‘green’ their operations.  Apple, for example, uses more glass and aluminum than plastics and have reduced the VOC’s and heavy metals in their fabrication processes. Others are following suit.  The good news is that the computer industry in general, for all it’s waste over the years, can go green much sooner than others.  The bad news is that no matter how green we get, we’ll still need to power the datacenters and networks that bring you, amongst other questionable things,  fine pieces of literature, such as this.

This article outlines numbers from a few studies, and suggests that the Internet is on par with the airline industry as far as CO2 emissions are concerned.  What they do not factor is transportation emissions for manufacturing and shipping.  I don’t want to rant here, but it’s the same reason that hybrid vehicles will not save the planet. Just about eveything, these days, manufactured in quantity is assembled from parts sourced from all over the world.  For example, most nickel based batteries are made from nickel mined in Sudbury Ontario Canada.  Last time I checked there are no battery manufacturing plants in Sudbury.  The nickel has to be shipped all over the place before it becomes a battery that, say,  Toyota can put in the Prius — in Japan.  What’s the CO2 cost of a Prius now?

The aforementioned article suggests that, left unchecked, carbon emissions  from Internet usage will increase 280% from current levels by the year 2020.  280 percent!?  The cost of energy certainly is not going down.  If usage patterns stay the same we’ll be paying 2.8X more, if by some miracle energy costs stay flat, just to keep equipment powered up in the next 10 years.   Now, I know 10 years is an eternity in the world of IT, but at this time if you run a tight ship the prospect of a controllable costs spiraling upward might be reason for pause.

So what can we do?

I have a few ideas:

• Virtualize where possible.
• Monitor workloads and move them to more efficient platforms when loads are low.
• Shut off workloads, or hardware altogether when not in use.  If you run a lab environment this is easy!
• Get smart about sizing your equipment properly.  I’ve seen, too many times, an admin buying WAY more hardware than is required for a project.  Check the old adage of ‘get what you can afford’ and make sure it’s the right decision.
• Turn up the temperature in your data center by 1-2 degrees.

I’d love to hear your ideas and thoughts on reducing power consumption, and your overall carbon footprint.

I’ll leave you with this thought:  Recently we hooked up a power usage monitoring device (like the Kill-A-Watt)  to a computer running Windows XP.  We fired up VMware server and launched two VM’s.  Power usage was directly correlated to VM workload.  More workload meant more power.  Seems logical right?   Interestingly, power usage dropped when we switched off a VM and moved it’s workload to the one remaining running VM.  Even though this single VM was doing more, less power was being consumed overall.

Tags: Monitor, monitoring, virtual workload, workloads

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 21st, 2009 at 6:00 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.