Building the Green Data Center 86
blackbearnh writes "O'Reilly News talked to Bill Coleman, former founder of BEA and current founder and CEO of Cassett Corporation, about the challenges involved in building more energy-efficient data centers. Coleman's company is trying to change the way resources in the data center are used, by more efficiently leveraging virtualization to utilize servers to a higher degree. In the interview, Coleman touches on this topic, but spends most of his time discussing how modern data centers grossly overcool and overdeploy hardware, leading to abysmal levels of efficiency."
Re:Lean Code = Green Code (Score:3, Insightful)
Software has an impact, too. Messy, heavy code takes longer to run, takes more CPUs, etc. Imagine how much energy could be saved if there wasn't so much code bloat!
So that means that servers should be built the Gentoo way, from scratch, using just the things you need, no more, no less.
How much does it cost to deploy such a server?
How much does it cost to pay someone qualified enough to do it properly?
The code bloat is paired with feature bloat. And the more features there are, the more you have to pick and choose -- or, if you cannot choose, support. Because your users will want them, more likely than not.
Now, cleaning up the world's code... sounds like great work. So great, in fact, that I doubt it will ever be undertaken, even if the whole world went open source.
Re:The outback (Score:3, Insightful)
No one in the server farm business is going to try and break into the solar-power business. It's not their area of expertise. It's an entirely different sort of business altogether. If there were a ton of solar power stations littering the outback, or if someone enterprising were ready to put some up in the hopes of attracting power-hungry industries with cheap electricity, that'd be another thing. But I would imagine it's still a rather risky proposition, as far as things go.
Besides, the bandwidth and latency to Australia from the rest of the world... not the greatest.
former founder (Score:3, Insightful)
How can you be a former founder of something? Someone else can't come along later and found it again can they?