Turning daisies into dollars - the realities of Green Computing

Talk of "greening" a datacenter or desktop seems a tad insane. After all, it's not like you're popping daisy stems into the holes of a raised floor. Instead, you're really talking about hunks of metal stuffed with often toxic chemicals, and these hunks of metal happen to have better performance per watt characteristics than last …

[Dick Emery]

It's all about the upgrades

I'd like to see low power CPU's and motherboards being sold that don't require any fans to cool etc. They could make CPU's with small dye footprints using the latest nanometer processes. That 45nm stuff cut into very small peices but still powerful enough to run a small server at some old P3/4 speeds would be fine and require little or no cooling and a lot lower power rating. Big power components generates heat and requires cooling thus more fans which also need power and more noise. OK if you are an enthusiast but not needed for some backend system you use to access storage or to serve up the odd webpage.

[Tanuki]

Null hypothesis.

TBH I'm an apathetic agnostic when it comes to the whole 'green computing' debate. I'm not here to 'save the planet', I'm here to make sure your data goes away when you flush, and to stop the cracker-rats or botheerder-slime crawling up your pipes into your toilet-bowl.

As far as I'm concerned the biggest issue around the 'global warming' stuff is to get the climate-scientists to tell me what grapes iIshould plant on my south-facing slopes. Perhaps they could fund a research project to investigate this pressing question?

[Anonymous Coward]

Spot the tautology - win a tautology!

"The big plan here is to move away from the "greening" cruft and help you form a solid green computing plan."

Excuse me?

So where's the "debate" then?

[Barry]

Bad timing

The Microsoft Launch event is happening that day, here in Los Angeles. I'd love to attend the debate, but I'll be there instead.

[Anonymous Coward]

@dick emery

*cough*

via epia boards?

[Anonymous Coward]

But where's the great debate...

...about Green Comment Posting? After all, commenters aren't doing anything pro-active to help the environment. It's about time they pulled their weight and stopped pretending they can get away with ignoring environmental concerns! Well, commenters? It's on YOUR shoulders to start greening your comments! Let's just say 'green' a whole lot! Green green green! See how aware we are of the environment?

Green!

*rolls eyes*

[Anonymous Coward]

Pointless

This so-called green computing 'debate' is pointless. I'm all for the 'green movement' in every aspect of every industry and of human society, it's logical and obvious, that's all there is to it. All that's happening these days is the marketing and sales types are jumping on the bandwagon, they probably don't know or care about the scientific(i.e LOGICAL) aspect of the whole thing. Just because something is a bandwagon doesn't mean it's wrong though. All that matters is the human race seems to *finally* be coming to the bloody obvious realisation that everything we do should follow a natural cycle, that's the ultimate aim, and who knows we might eventually get there.

So stop trying to start meaningless debates and just get on with the job!

[Dick Emery]

Ahem!

Yes I know about the Epia boards etc. What I am trying to say but didn't really make it clear was that companies like Intel and AMD who are the big name players in the consumer sector are not really pushing for low energy solutions on the desktop. Sure they have lower powered laptops but even those are power hungry when all you need to do is have a dumb file server and anything that is file server is expensive business systems or an NAS which is overpriced IMHO in comparison to a standard external HD. Just look at Windows server. How much? For what hardware and software? Get real. Companies should be looking into ways to do certain things based on their power requirements. We all know a desktop PC needs lots of 'oomph!' to run the latest games. But they don't seem to promote anything for the lower end. Unless you are a geek and know what you are doing (Putting some flavour of *nix on a low spec PC for the backroom for instance) most people don't even think about these things.

Paris because she would just buy a Mac anyhow (Jobs where are your power saving systems?).

[Brian Miller]

Small, fast, quite good

Right on, Dick Emery!

I bought some 1.2GHz Celeron (23W motherboard) systems for development test beds. More than fast enough for what I'm doing, and I think more than fast enough for SMB server applicaitons. Less than $80 for the base motherboard, and less than $250 for a complete system. Why should I complain?

The competing AMD motherboard is just under $200, and a Via system was $40 more. Where is a person going to spend their money? The cheapest seat available, which is Intel.

I think that a lot of us have stories of ancient Pentium systems chugging away in the back room. All of those could be replaced for a few hundred bucks with a new system that uses far less power and gives far greater performance. There's your "datacenter greening" for you.

[Jonathan McColl]

Nostalgia for greener days

A long time ago I got my CNE from Novell, when Microsoft NT was an interesting new competitor, small and inefficient compared to us Big Boys, but interesting. Now MS rules so we need an order of magnitude more servers and all the power they consume. Yeah, I know, if pigs had wings they'd be pigeons.

I'll just get my coat and a very strong umbrella...

[John]

I'll attend...

... but only if the BOFH and PFY are there to keep things on an even keel!