Green it now

(Arguably, the title should be "Green IT now", but I prefer not to shout.) Anyways, a number of interesting bits of information in regard to more ecologically friendly information technology -- theory and practice thereof -- have crossed my desktop in the past 24 hours.

Coincidentally, my alleged mind had started thinking along those lines last night, when I was replenishing the family supply of cat litter at a local warehouse outlet store. In order to get to the cat litter aisle (yes, there is such!), I have to walk through the electronics section. A product caught my eye -- an uninterruptible power supply/surge suppressor/power strip for a personal computer. What interested me was that one of the outlets on the front was labeled "master", and two other outlets were (according to the packaging) controlled by the master (presumably, referred to as "slaves"). If the PC you plug into the master outlet gets turned off, whatever you have plugged into the slave outlets automatically also get turned off. (What happens if the PC goes into sleep mode, the packaging didn't make clear.)

I'd seen similar features on simple power strips before, but not incorporated into a UPS. Makes sense, of course, except that (1) there should probably be more than two slaves, or perhaps a number of switchable slave/freeman outlets, and (2) the two slave outlets were directly adjacent to one another, and fairly narrowly spaced. This last is significant if you recognize that the most common use of two slave outlets is likely to be for a monitor and speakers, and many PC speaker systems have a power supply built into the plug -- that it can look like you've got a brick positioned on your wall. That big plug would take up one slave outlet and at least partially block the other, kind of defeating the purpose. (So, I guess I'll be waiting for version 2.0).

Of the messages I received today, the one most closely related to that consumer-grade UPS relates to an invention which is supposed to allow a computer to perform a number of simple tasks while remaining in sleep mode. Called the "Somniloquy" (named after the act of talking in one's sleep), it was developed at UC San Diego. Your computer still has to wake up to allow you to do work processing or email, but it can stay asleep and handle things like file downloads, voice over the internet ("voip"), and remote access. Computers draw no more than 20% of full power when asleep.

Of more interest at an institutional level (Greenback doesn't use voip, at least not officially), the world now has a LEED platinum data center. Citibank built it, in Frankfurt, Germany. Our campus data center is currently an energy hog (it was originally engineered to support large mainframes, not much smaller servers), so we're thinking about whether it makes sense to move it into a more efficient facility. If we can attain anything like the 70% energy savings that Citi is claiming, the answer is almost certainly "yes".

And (here's the ironically interesting part) it seems likely that we can. Not by implementing some expensive combination of leading-edge construction technologies, but the old-fashioned way. With concrete. Apparently, Fortune Data Center has determined that situating their equipment on a simple (if large) concrete slab can make 75% of their cooling energy consumption (cooling is a big deal in any data center) go away. Concrete isn't the whole trick (virtualization, or the act of making one big server act like a whole host of smaller ones, is another major contributor), but it's a large piece of the puzzle.

(Yes, I know that the act of converting limestone into cement for the purpose of creating concrete is a huge CO2 emitter, but at least it's a one-time occurrence rather than a continuing stream. The Romans laid down some concrete 2,000 years ago that's still holding together just fine. At Greenback, somehow I doubt that any new data center will have to last that long.)