Friday, March 12, 2010

Environmental IT

This post is  meant to review some of the areas of the Green IT arena. Currently, I'm trying to break out in doing consulting with my side project Green Sparks IT. I will be updating this post routinely as I learn more and we find more about this.

Here are some of the main areas where green IT can come into play:

Virtualization
- This technique uses software from XEN, VMWare or others to have several virtual server platforms running on the same system simultaneously. The argument is that the biggest environmental impact of computing is not just energy, but also the equipment. Being able to squeeze 2-20 servers onto one physical machine saves a lot energy and precious resources.

Less-intensive cooling - A big thing right now is trying to figure out how cool we need to keep servers. A big factor in data center energy use is in cooling the servers. A popular school of thought is to have hot rows and cold rows in the data center. The differences in air temperature creates drafts that keep the servers relatively cool in addition to what the cooling system already does. It's a good idea, but the question remains if they even need to be that cool. How hot can you keep the data center. Can you avoid not including all of that air conditioning. Can you use natural sources such as water to do the cooling that might not require as much energy to pump through? A lot of good work is being done here.

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