Template:Economic green in green computing

From Lauraibm

Full article: Finding the Economic Green in Green Computing (18-Sep-07)

Data centre managers should shut down any server if they are unsure of the function it serves, according to Sun's director of sustainable computing. It has been found that idle servers use nearly as much power as if they were active; so leaving them switched on is a huge waste of power.

About 70% of servers run just one application, he said, and after a new sserver is added to an application, it is usually never subsequently redeployed elsewhere.

People who use that server then come and go, and eventually the application that runs on it becomes outdated. If the IT staff isn't paying attention, these boxes often continue to run, wasting power.

"When we started looking closely at our big data centers, we found that somewhere between 8 percent and 10 percent of our servers had no identifiable function," Monroe said. "There was no program running other than the operating system that we could tell."

He said Sun staff went through the asset databases and found these servers were basically orphans.

"So we turned them off and waited to see if anybody complained," Monroe said. "We shut them off and waited until we got an e-mail. Our success rate in turning those off is something higher than 60 percent."

Overall, he said, the Santa Clara, Calif., company discovered that 504 of its 4,300 servers could be turned off without impacting anybody.

Another way of saving power and cooling costs is to turn the temperature up a little—raising the thermostat by just one degree can save 4% on cooling energy.