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The GreenIT initiative at CeBIT is centralized in a small area of
CeBIT’s Future Park (Building 9), and while the displays aren’t
enormously awesome, the scuttlebutt was amazing. While hardware and OS
vendors attempt to find the right trade-offs in power-saving
architectures, there’s apparently a lot that can thwart even some of
the best green features.
Whether desktop or server, a lot of the hardware-possible savings
relates to how much the OS and its apps can allow the platform to do
orderly shutdowns of specific functions that use power. CPUs, whether
from Intel or AMD or VIA have advanced power savings modes that are
becoming increasingly flexible as newer generation designs are built
with ‘green in mind’. It turns out that even the best power savings
modes can be easily thwarted by both OS modes, applications, and lack
of OS drivers that support the savings functionalities. Even subtle
savings can be lost, apparently.
None of the people I talked to wanted to be directly quoted. Yet all
of them rolled their eyes with miscellaneous stories regarding some of
their best-laid plans dashed against the wall of the unexpected. I
listened to one tale about how most of the VM hypervisor software in
the marketplace essentially subverts and shuts off CPU power savings
modes. The apparent rationale is that CPU allocations need to be
tossed off to guest hosts that sit atop VM hypervisor kernels. The
handoffs wake up the CPUs, or just prevent them from going into a
power-savings sleep mode.
And even if there’s not a VM kernel running things in a server,
there’s a large problem (especially, it seems in FOSS code) where
applications use low-priority routines to do various maintenance tasks
(flush cache, scratch noses) that keep the CPUs alive as well. There’s
just no ‘quiet’ time in the code, causing the CPU and chipsets to run
at full clip essentially 100% of the time. This means that all of the
green ‘goo’ inside of various CPUs becomes essentially worthless in
terms of the ability to actually save power.
High-end gaming PC vendor has built an entire line of desktop
motherboards that have strenuously applied green savings, even for the
overclocker crowds. There’s a power meter that shows when you’re
actually savings money by toggling one of several different power
savings modes. The savings are available for Windows XP and Vista, but
when I asked about Linux in its various flavors, there was hardly any
information available about drivers or compatibility modes that might
make a difference for say, an Ubuntu user.
It’s Not Easy Being Green
All the reps that I talked to seemed to agree that green attitude
adoption seems to be a direct function of how much the wallet gets
hurt by ever-rising energy costs. This effect’s probably nicely
demonstrated by the Danes, who pay 25 euro cents per kilowatt hour,
among the highest in Europe. For those of you that like to be blinded
by reality, that’s 37.5 US cents per KW– and Californians and many
Texans know the feeling of that pain. The motivation then is
apparently an often knee-jerk cost-control set of draconian measure,
followed by what might have been needed all along: planning and
investigation. Funny how that works.
GreenIT philosophies also extend to other industry segments, including
cooling, air flow, and even air filtration. Dogmatic greens also cite
that even apparel has an effect on quality. Perhaps that’s the
rational behind the T-Shirt I saw with ‘Climate Neutral Cotton
Apparel’ slogan on it. Oddly, perhaps amazingly, the number of UPS and
datacenter power management companies represented in the GreenIT
center, and its constituent sponsors located across the 24 buildings
of the CeBIT fair, were sparce– the big names are missing. Perhaps
it’s like the old adage about buying a Rolls Royce. If you have to ask
the MPG, can’t afford it.