Hardware Green Revolution

The necessity of green technology has appeared as response to the rising costs of energy resources and the fact that some materials are harmful to human lives. Today, technology manufacturers are given the opportunity to show their genius by developing some energy-efficient technologies. The very first step is to make hardware green.

Energy efficient hardware

According to recent Stanford University research, the period between 2000 and 2005 registered a double energy use by data center servers, cooling equipment, and related infrastructure. This is followed by a considerable growth in power costs during the same time period – 132% (report by engineering professor Jonathon G. Koomey).

Hardware manufacturers are to face the situation when they, on the one hand should provide market with faster processors and on the other hand to address concerns about climate change. All the above should be with an eye on the rising cost of operating data center equipment.

Some of the great companies such as Dell, IBM, Hewlett-Packard and Sun Microsystems have recently succeeded to provide users with premium-priced servers. These are energy efficient technologies that can gain back the added upfront cost in less than a year.

Where electricity leaks?

There are a lot of companies that overspend thousands of dollars per month on electricity! The main reason for this is the inefficient power equipment in the company's data centers. Plus, any of them provides their equipment with uninterrupted power supplies (UPS), which are meant to keep servers protected against grid failure. They consume far more power and operate in average at 60% energy-efficiency.

Smaller modular UPS hardware turned up to be a great solution for most of the companies. They allow to reduce the energy consumption by 20%. Another power-saving strategy that some companies have adopted is switching from traditional floor-based cooling to more efficient in-row chillers. The last ones counter the heat by being placed close to the source. The third strategy is to reduce the number of PCs by adding more load on existing ones through server virtualization software.

The Green Grid reduces energy consumption

The Green Grid is a worldwide known project intended by the largest information technology companies to reduce data center energy consumption. Among the biggest promoters of this project are AMD, IBM, Intel, Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft, and Sun Microsystems. The key task for them is to agree on benchmarks to indicate hardware energy requirements.

This will enable users to compare the amount of energy each hardware consumes. The chain reaction principle will determine manufacturers to proceed towards energy efficient technology. Hardware vendors will seek for suppliers that produce energy efficient individual components, such as processors, routers, and disc drives.

New types of hardware will have the capability to switch to a lower power state when not used. This will make manufacturers determine how quickly equipment returns to operation -- the mean time to re-power.