What is Digg?82 Comments
- frooo, on 05/02/2008, -4/+23From the Article
"For example, computer servers are used at only 6 percent of their capacity on average"
So a call out to all Internet users... more lolcats and pr0n plz - its good for the environment. - bromac, on 05/02/2008, -2/+15Know what I'm ***** sick of?
People using liberal as a put down. Most people's political views aren't as simple as your black and white, left or right thinking make them out to be.
If being liberal in some areas (read: not afraid of change, the definition of liberal thinking) is so bad, you wouldn't have the democracy (or republic if you prefer) that you enjoy today. Being conservative about things that work is all well and good, and being liberal in areas that need change is good as well. Stop trying to pigeonhole people. It just makes you look like a douche. - lead2thehead, on 05/02/2008, -1/+9So why are we blaming the data centers and not the coal burning power plants?
- chrispeters, on 05/02/2008, -0/+7You mean like this http://www.google.com/corporate/solarpanels/home
- jdpalite, on 05/02/2008, -2/+9This is why virtualization and blades are a very good thing. Blades give you about 30% (claimed) power savings based on the same horsepower in standard rackmount servers. Virtualization allows you to put multiple virtual machines on a single server (or blade), better utilizing its resources.
- skyshock1, on 05/02/2008, -0/+7No. Not at the datacenter I work at. The blade centers we've tested use roughly 4 times the power that IBM claims. Not to mention the cooling costs when you have servers running at 100% CPU usage that are that dense.
- serif69, on 05/02/2008, -1/+7Apparently my multi-terabyte porn collection is polluting more than just my mind.
- specialK16, on 05/02/2008, -0/+5Care to explain why? I'm really interested in that argument.
- jdpalite, on 05/02/2008, -0/+4By "power ability" I think you mean that your CPU usage isn't maxing out your Mini. That's great, but what you did lose was server-grade hardware, redundant power supplies, RAID, drive performance, magement flexibility... It's not a server.
- megaton, on 05/02/2008, -0/+3Google specifically locates their datacenters near clean energy so that they don't contribute to the problem.
- inactive, on 05/02/2008, -0/+3It's ironic but Google is one of the most supportive companies when it comes to Earth related issues. They are an example to follow.
- willsani, on 05/02/2008, -2/+5Virtualize everything!
- JimXugle, on 05/02/2008, -0/+2I'm not IT-industry or green-industry involved in any way, but from my limited understanding, couldn't Datacenters use in-house DC distribution instead of AC distribution? Couldn't they use a centralized (yet redundant) watercooling system?
Any industry professionals care to chime in? - dualboy24, on 05/02/2008, -0/+2Well its hard to say by 2020 whats going to happen. I mean computers and servers will be replaced with more power efficient equipment that performs better. Solid state storage uses less power, CPUs can down scale their speed on the fly, all this wonderful stuff can happen now so in 12 years who knows what we will see. Also the power that runs these centers can come from any source like clean solar or wind, or a combination of coal with carbon capture, etc... I doubt the airline industry can claim the same in 12 years.
(Note: I wrote this much better the first time till I lost it... perhaps in the future fix it so form data doesn't get lost so easily) - killbert24, on 05/02/2008, -4/+6If data centers pollute, then Google is destroying Earth!
I'm just kidding. I like Google. They just need to use solar power, and probably already are. - kreatre2007, on 05/02/2008, -1/+3Jeezus... what the hell is next? Eventually, these kooks will assert that our computers are responsible for greenhouse gas emissions. Think I'm being ridiculous? Watch and see.
- JHW539, on 05/02/2008, -0/+2There is a lot of opportunity to improve efficiency - datacenters I work on now use about 30% less power than a standard facility. They'll never go solar (20 MW 8760 hours a year is tough to pull off via solar), but they can get a lot better. Cooling power can be taken down 80% or more in the majority of climates and eventually it may just be heatpipe pumped radiators for essentially free cooling (radiating/convecting to atmosphere), like many radar installations do now. That said, it takes power to flip transistors and requirements are only going up (video and voice recognition has to really hit eventually). The ultimate savings is recovering the waste heat from the machines and using it to heat an adjacent demand, like greenhouses or a lumber drying facility. But we're not there yet - energy is still so cheap it's better to throw away MW's of heat off the computers than to deal with security issues implicit in coordinating with another industry.
- TJ11240, on 05/02/2008, -0/+2Water vapor stays in the air for a week, while CO2 remains for centuries.
- CSharpSauce, on 05/02/2008, -0/+2I write software for Server Virtualization, however one thing i've noticed about server consolidation... is it seems like we've only increased servers :) After we free up a server because we've consolidated it onto a virtual host suddenly another manager sees free hardware to contribute to his cause..... which in a year or two will ultimatly be consolidated once again by my team :)
- skyshock1, on 05/02/2008, -3/+5*****.
Aluminum smelting factories use WAY WAY more power than most datacenters. Now then that said, datacenters are just using electricity that's already available to them on the grid. If they're talking about pollution due to energy use, shouldn't we be pointing fingers at the PRODUCERS of that pollution-laden energy (i.e. coal burning factories versus the much cleaner Nuclear energy), rather than the CONSUMERS of that energy (datacenters, factories, neighborhoods, etc...). A datacenter's main output (other than data packets) is heat loss. Most of which is either reclaimed as energy or released harmlessly into the atmosphere.
/works in a datacenter - HotSaucePanCake, on 05/02/2008, -0/+1Every letter I T y P E is contributing to global warming, smoke that up your little tail pipe!
- expatcatalyst, on 05/02/2008, -0/+1Uptime Institute, what a joke. Has anyone here ever dealt with them? Dr. Bob in his smock with the tin foil hat...
- stukdog, on 05/02/2008, -0/+1Not compared to an XServe. If you want a dedicated Mac server it is the much cheaper way to go.
- Spectrum7331, on 05/02/2008, -0/+1ALL NIGHT LONG
- linuxpenguin, on 05/02/2008, -0/+1Buried as inaccurate. It's not the data centers that pollute, it's the servers in them. If you use efficient servers, there's no problem, and the company controls the servers. Sometimes companies put their servers in data centers that they don't own - they're the ones polluting. The company who owns the data center (at least TTBOMK) has little say in how efficient the servers which others house in the datacenter need to be.
- fokov, on 05/02/2008, -0/+1Exactly, Microsoft, Apple, and Linux devs are already workingo n this problem because it has an immediate return on value. Telling the system to use less energy, reduces cost of electricity, which reduces the cost of cooling. So in the end there is a more efficient use of power, so less is necessary and less fuel is used to create it.
- Spectrum7331, on 05/02/2008, -0/+1If there's regulation on it, of course.
- mquannie, on 05/02/2008, -0/+1"world’s data centers are projected to surpass the airline industry as a greenhouse gas polluter by 2020"
Uh, may be because people are using more email instead of air mail? - dustin32, on 05/02/2008, -1/+2On what, Sherlock?
- hpggamer80, on 05/02/2008, -0/+1Your right, I mean its not like the data centers are chugging out the greenhouse gas, its the utilities that are providing it. I bet you that the planes are not looking into using alternative fuels.
- SteelTallon, on 05/02/2008, -0/+1The article beat me too it!!
"The report also lists 10 “game-changing improvements” intended to double data center efficiency, ranging from using virtualization software........"
Before I got laid off (Damn Mortgage Crisis!!), I was experimenting with VMWare Virtualization... I think that is a good solution in many ways.. Overhead, redundancy, and less power comsumption just to name a few.... - xmod3, on 05/02/2008, -0/+1Wow, that's pretty shocking. Never would have thought.
- chrisinsocalif, on 05/02/2008, -0/+1It's the blame game, blame whatever is the easiest target that will get my agenda accomplished.
- fkr3, on 05/02/2008, -1/+2That's their offices not their datacenters. Would you call airline companies green if their offices - but not their planes - went solar?
- willsani, on 05/04/2008, -0/+1Umm the point of VZ is to lower the number of servers that aren't critical... I can give you a few thousand examples of what I've done but I don't think you would be interested...
- atbnet, on 05/02/2008, -0/+1Mac Mini Colo is extremely expensive.
- regeya, on 05/02/2008, -0/+1Well, good luck in getting hired elsewhere; personally I feel the mortgage crisis is way overstated and that most of the recession is because we're too consumer-reliant, and the double-whammy being consumers also tightening because various funds pumped all their ca$h into commodities...'coz, y'know, it'd be tragic if some billionaire lost a million or two. Again, sorry for the loss of your job. I wonder how many CEOs in the investment banking business lost their jobs, and of those, how many got a fat stack of cash for being told to GTFO?
- twomeyw23334, on 05/02/2008, -0/+1Then I apologize to you my friend.
- regeya, on 05/02/2008, -1/+2Here's a fact: During the Jurassic period, CO2 levels were 1800 ppm.
Here's another: We're about 18,000 years into a 20,000 year temporary warming trend. Hard to believe on a hot summer day, but we're actually still in an ice age.
Have a nice day! - st00f72, on 05/02/2008, -0/+1"1/2 the power consumption is for the AC" Maybe, but don't you lose efficiency the more remotely you place datacenters from traffic?
- SteelTallon, on 05/02/2008, -0/+1Thanks.. I landed a City job starting Monday... Which actually starts off with better pay than my last...lol I was one of the last 2 to get laid off from my last company. In total, I probably deleted well over 200 user accounts with in a 3 month time span because of lay-offs or closures... It was a very depressing, anxiety filled time period (last Oct).
- specialK16, on 05/02/2008, -0/+1In the butt.
- atbnet, on 05/02/2008, -0/+1People tend to over do it when it comes to ordering up hardware for whatever they are doing. I've always went with the bare minimum and never had a problem with it. Once though I had made image upload script for friends and personal use that was found by a German porn uploading forum. I wondered why my server all of the sudden became unresponsive when I found they were maxing out a 100 mbit port with Apache serving up image files that had my load out of this world.
- skyshock1, on 05/02/2008, -0/+1Ours doesn't specifically but it is possible to do with liquid cooling setups. It's not a terribly cost efficient process though so most don't do it.
- mstrebe, on 05/02/2008, -0/+1I'm not sure what your comment is supposed to mean--the atmosphere has a considerable amount of water vapor at all times. Furthermore, water vapor is 40x more potent than CO2 as a green-house gas. The scientific presumption is that the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere remains constant, but that's a presumption that has never been tested.
- regeya, on 05/02/2008, -0/+1Ding ding ding! You win the thread!
People like to deflect blame on the Internet for high pollution, but they ignore that we have a relatively safe power source available that, due to largely irrational fears borne of early unsafe designs, has been blocked at every turn by environmentalists. Yes, nuclear. It's not sustainable, and its waste has to be stored safely for A LONG TIME, but it's here, it's proven to work, and despite fear-mongering about radiation and the amount of dino juice required to get the stuff, it's pretty clean energy.
I'm all for breaking out the solar thermal and biogas plants (and even for reducing energy use altogether) but just as we need long-term solutions, we also need short-term solutions. - inactive, on 05/02/2008, -0/+1It's not cool but it will justify the power consumption. The real solution is to use less 'overpowered' servers. With the digg effect around I don't think is going to happen anytime soon.
- computergod, on 05/02/2008, -0/+1Yup, virtualization is the way to go. IBM beat VMWare to the punch though with VM/ESA in the 70's which is still in heavy use today. With IBM VM you can do really awesome stuff like sharing the same partition and memory.
- inactive, on 05/02/2008, -0/+1Is this a new way to tax the Internet?
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