Hi, I'm JT and these are my thoughts on community, content management, Plain Black, and WebGUI.
Hi, I'm JT and these are my thoughts on community, content management, Plain Black, and WebGUI.
Plain Black may soon be Plain Green, at least that is my personal goal. No, we're not changing our name. What we are doing is working on changing our business practices to be as environmentally sustainable as possible.
You might think to yourself, "Plain Black doesn't make any physical goods, what do you have to make green?" The answer is "Plenty". We're looking at sources to get our books, brochures, and business cards printed using soy inks, and on recycled paper. All of our employees telecommute so we're trying to figure out incentive programs to reward employees for going green in their own homes. And we've been looking at how to get green energy for our data centers. We're even looking at what it would take to get our WUC t-shirts and other conference materials made from green materials.
Before you think I've swung off the deep end, no I'm not going to start preaching to you about how green you're not. And no I'm not going to tell you that you must become a vegan or else you're a murderer of animals. Everybody can use some improvement in being green and I love a good steak as much as the next guy. Everybody has a right to their beliefs, but those are not mine. Instead, I think that sustainability has to go both ways. Green has to be both economically and environmentally sustainable, because without both economy and environment we cannot have society. And I think that people that are too far on either side of the fence to see that are just foolish.
I'd like all hand on deck. If you have ideas on how Plain Black can become Plain Green please share them by replying here. And I hope to have a green report at the WUC each year from now on.
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User:
Albert2
Date: 6/22/2008 7:31 am |
Rating: 10
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Status: Approved |
First of all: great initiative!
I have some experience with low power computing (I designed and created the fully working proof of concept op http://www.simpc.nl. Quit a bit of the work was done in the hotel in Chicago during the first WUC 
)
You probably already know or realise the following, but for the datacentre the following items usually are worth looking at:
- Power supplies
- Hard drives
In a server, the CPUs are the power hungry as well, but for a server it usually doesn't make sense to go with a low power version as that would very quickly result in needing more servers.
Power supplies nowadays are available in much more efficient versions. All heat generated by a power supply is a waste of energy. And the generated heat also makes you use more power cooling. Therefor, looking at the specs of the power supplies pays of.
Hard drives:
- 3.5 inch drives take the most power of the available hard drives. And they also not designed to be spinned down often.
- 2.5 inch (laptop drives) use a lot less power , and you can get away with using laptopmodetools under Linux. Laptopmode tools will make the drive spin down much more often, but these laptops drives are designed to cope with that.
- booting from a USB stick (really low power). The sticks cannot however provide you with the storage needs. You'd need a SAN to provide the storage. Of course this only makes sense if you have enough servers for this to result in an actual power saving measure. This certainly is not someting easy to implement.
Some may argue that you 'really need server grade' hard drives. Google doesn't. Just make sure that there is redudancy. You need that anyway, even with the 'server grade' drives.
And last but not least, virtualisation may also help a great deal.