Greening IT
Moores Law states that the number of transistors on a microprocessor will double about every two years. The law has held up pretty much since Gordon Moore, one of the founders of Intel, first published his paper on the subject in 1965. With the increase in chip capacity came a rise in speed and therefore processing power. We have powerful computers today because of the technology and innovation that drives chip design and production. When the first men landed on the moon it sometimes said that there was less computing power on the spacecraft than there is on a modern mobile phone. So we’ve come a long way in 40 years or so.
For the stand alone home or office computer or laptop the amount of energy consumed is large in itself. Now consider taking an individual computer with all it’s associated processor technology and less the peripherals, such as the screen and mouse, and multiplying that by hundreds, maybe thousands of similar devices in the same room. These rooms are eupehmistically termed a ’server farm’, where lines upon lines of individual servers get stacked together to process information. This scenario presents processor designers at the front end and building services engineers at the back end, with the same problem, how to dissipate heat and minimise power requirements. The reason server farms exist in the first place is because our world is becoming more data driven. And in the world of 24/7 data requirements then the server farm is indeed a practical solution.
Grouped servers or server farms generate huge amounts of heat and because the servers must be kept cool relative to their operating limits then a huge amount of energy must be expended on ventilation and air conditioning. As the energy demand goes up, so too does the cost. And because more and more companies are using these server farms to process and warehouse data, then the demand for both the faster technology and energy is rising in parallel. As the world is increasingly becoming more speed and data driven, increasing data requirements are driving demand for more server capacity and therefore larger and more complex storage locations. This is both a problem and an opportunity.
The problem ofcourse as we’ve already mentioned, is that, as the server farms get bigger and more complex, they require more energy, distributed in it’s many different forms. Likewise, the folks that build processors are continuing to pack more processing power onto smaller boards, leading to even greater heat production and as a result, greater demand for cooling to keep the server within it’s operating parameters.
The solutions to these enormous challenges are not green, per se, but are hopefully moving us towards a situation where less energy will be consumed by more complex technology. There are still the issues around the raw materials that go into microprocessor production ofcourse, the use of toxic substances and precious metals for instance, but where less energy consumption is the end goal in this increasingly carbon constrained world, then technology innovation will be the key.
Companies are currently working on increasing server consolidation and virtualisation whilst at the same time reducing the amount of real estate needed to house the servers. Fewer, more efficient and more densely populated servers which are more efficiently utilised are becoming a ‘hot topic’. Air distribution technology that distributes more air around a server core, to keep the server cooler, is also becoming more advanced.
The sector is still faced with a huge problem and it’s one that the industry is beginning to address in a number of different ways. But demand for faster and more complex computing is still driving sales and as a result pressures are increasing to get more complex products to market, sooner, and as more competitors vie for a share of this burgeoning consumer market, the race to get smaller, better, faster get only get more intense. Likewise, although efficiencies are usually a good thing we can also be more efficient at using more of a resource, take the destruction of the natural environment in the Amazon rain forest as an example. This race to maximise efficiencies could therefore be a double edged sword in terms of environmental impact.
Going ‘green’ with IT (Information Technology) will require greater industry collaboration to drive innovation towards a less energy intensive scenario. It will also involve transformation along every aspect of the value chain. It’s not just the technology world that will be impacted.
So as we getter faster and faster data streams, can we get greener technologies to support them? It’s one of the great challenges of the 21st Century for all industry sectors, but in the end it’s a combination of humans, technology and the natural world that will need to come up with the solution before the heat gets too much for everyone .
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[...] Going Green with IT and applying a tier to the application and infrastructure Published by Martin on Monday 15th June 2009, 20:49 | Filed under: Processes, Virtualisation Hello there! If you are new here, you might want to subscribe to the RSS feed for updates on this topic.Powered by WP Greet BoxGreenme [...]