Singapore to offer enterprises incentives to buy greener hardware

Singapore will offer incentives aimed at encouraging enterprises to upgrade their hardware fleets, as part of a Green Data Centre Roadmap announced yesterday. The government's green vision includes a mix of old and new tech, senior minister of state for Communications and Information Janil Puthucheary explained at a summit in …

[Lurko]

Not that unlikely a location

Singapore has an excellent reputation for an open economy, high levels of development, stability, and the rule of law. Those are all rather more important than cheap and readily available energy, where locations like Nigeria, Russia, Turkey, Qatar, Saudi beckon. Or neighbouring Malaysia.

But a few questions for any resident DC experts if I may:

Ignoring some magic sauce of low power heat removal, or low heat/MIPS* processors, surely any modern bit barn isn't knowingly throwing energy away on wasteful processing - with aircon and ancillaries multiplying the processing power needs by 3 (last time I paid attention) surely power use is extremely high on the agenda for DC operators and designers?

Can SmartNICs really reduce power by an material extent , or are they just shifting the load around? Shifting to a lower power cost location saves money, but then presumably leaves the "losing" DC under-utilised?

For a given useful volume of end-user instructions, is there much variation in power consumed by different DCs and by different technologies such as containerisation?

* Or whatever, your area not mine!