The past few years have showed us a boom in the fad of "going green" with everything from automobiles to your home. Some people have taken advantage of the situation and claimed the need to put a price on the amount of carbon emissions each individual puts in the air. Everyone should be given a quota and if you go over that quota you need to buy "carbon credits" otherwise you face "penalties." I'm glad we haven't reached la-la land just yet, but there are simple ways to go green without going overboard.
I run a server at home for routing, web, email, files, and almost any little idea I think of. Now that I've told you I will have to kill you as ISPs frown on this freedom of expression. Anyway, this server has been comprised of spare parts and/or whatever I could buy for $20. Now that I have a decent job, I decided I wanted a computer I could call a server and stand by it. It also had to draw less electricity and put out less heat and noise. Let's compare my setups:
Junker
- 1.4ghz "Tualatin" Pentium III-S
- 512mb PC-133 RAM (i815 chipset limitation)
- ASUS TUSL2 motherboard
- 320gb Seagate 7200.10
- Intel 100 mbit and 1000 mbit PCI cards
- $50 case with 350watt PSU (all-in-one)
Upgrade
- 1.86ghz "Lynnfield" Xeon L3426
- 4gb DDR3 1333 ECC RAM
- Supermicro X8SIL-F motherboard
- 2x1TB Seagate 7200.12 (RAID 1)
- Dual on-board Intel 1gb NICs
- Antec MicroATX case + SeaSonic 500watt 80 Plus Bronze PSU
The junker runs at a nice loud, slow pace. PHP and any disk intensive request was a several second ordeal. Most of that is due to the limited amount of RAM. I hooked up the Kill-a-watt power meter to the junker to see how much electricity I'm wasting.
62 watts - at idle. The computer is lifeless and it's eating enough energy to power an old school light bulb. Think of all the nuclear power I'm wasting; I can't sleep at night.
Putting the new server together was the fastest assembly for me yet. Most things are now on-board and the only power connections were for the motherboard and hard drives. Hitting the power switch brought forth... silence. Ah... What's this? A BIOS prompt. After installing Fedora 11 x86_64 using my USB drive (no CDs or floppies were hurt in this process, something other OSes can't say), I ran the power meter on it. A whole...
40 watts at idle. With more than 10 times the computing power (and 1 vs 4 cores) and an additional hard drive, the new system was eating 22 (
woot math) less watts! Just to put this in an even more interesting twist, my one year old desktop computer pulls a hefty 96 watts out of the Earth. It has a 9800 GTX+ helping it get that high though.
What's the meaning of all this? Well, I should get some nice medal from Al Gore for saving the planet, right? Heck, I'd take just a letter. Now get out there and green up your computing environment. Doctor's orders.