Hello and welcome to my first blog. Ever. You'd think someone who's worked at an ISP for over 12 years would have done one by now. But no, this is my first one. So please excuse all the speeling mistakes and the grammar in errors! And blame Aydin, it's all his fault.

Richard Morrell, CTO

What happened to Green Computing?

Green Computing has been en vogue for the last year or so now, so you'd think that datacentre operators (like us) would finally start to see their power and cooling requirements fall. If you listen to the major server manufacturers, their products are more efficient and "greener" than they have been. Some manufacturers are claiming that their new servers use 40% less power that previous models. Granted, it's small amounts of power per server (less than quarter of an amp per server in most cases). But when you add it up over the 1000s of servers hosted in a datacentre, you are talking about potentially hundreds of thousands of kilowatt hours (and hundreds of tonnes of CO2) to be saved every year. But datacentres are continuing to see our customer's power consumption increase rather than get lower, so what happened to Green Computing?

The answer? Moore's Law.

Gordon Moore was the co-founder of Intel and back in 1965 made the observation about CPUs in a research paper that stated "that the number of transistors that can be inexpensively placed on an integrated circuit is increasing exponentially, doubling approximately every two years." The number of transistors on a CPU generally increases to keep step with increasing demands for faster CPUs and more processing power. Dual core means roughly double the number of transistors than a single core and so on...

Everytime you double the number of transistors, you roughly double the power consumption of the processor. So, you know the 40% power you saved by moving to Green Computing? Well, because you need faster, more powerful servers, in 2 years you have doubled your power consumption. So instead of being at 60% of your power utilisation last year, you're now at 120% (60% doubled).

20% more power use, despite Green Computing? Surely not!

Unfortunately, it's true. Let's take Dell as an example vendor. Here are the average power consumption figures (from Dell themselves) for three generations of their 1U servers:

Spotting a trend yet?

So what can be done?

There's still ways to reduce your power consumption (and still be Greener). How?

• Buy the Green Computing servers anyway. But make sure you buy them intelligently. Don't just be swayed by a "Green Computing/Energy Efficient" badge. Dig deeper. Have a look at the server's power consumption versus it's processing power and try to find the one that gives you the most bang per watt.
• Use environmentally friendly cooling. Cooling can be responsible for up to 33% of your datacentre power consumption. Hosting your equipment in a datacentre that uses efficient cooling technologies (such as Ambicool) will reduce your environmental impact.
• Use virtualisation. There's a lot of spare processor cycles sitting on your servers unused. By consolidating multiple server roles a smaller number of servers, you get a more efficient use of the resources you have.
• Source your electricity from renewable supplies. You can't run your servers with out power, but you can make sure that the power they use isn't generated by pumping hundreds of tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere. There's a small, but growing number of tarriff's available from electricity suppliers which provide power from renewable power generation (such as wind, wave, hydro, etc).

So, even though Green Computing isn't able to cut our power use, it is able to help slow it's increase. However, by making intelligent choices on how and where we source our power, cooling and servers we can still reduce the impact our systems have on the environment.

If you'd like to discuss Green Computing, Datacentres or anything else mentioned above then email me at: richard.morrell@lumison.net