Green IT Expo Report
November 10, 2008 by Raj Sheelvant
The following blog is by Guest Blogger Patrick Dacre, Chief Encouragement Officer for HarmonyNet Media Group and Developer of In Business 4 Good Campaigns. View his LinkedIn bio here. Contact him at +16469613748.
During my recent visit to London, I was thrilled to be invited to the local Green IT expo, which came through my association with the Climate Computers Savings Initiative. During the time there, the variety of Green IT ROI seminars were intense, to the point that the conflicting vendor claims started to run into one another. The issue at hand here, is how are these measured.
Well, a breath of fresh air, in the guise of a Sheffield Based concern, VeryPC, showed a glimmer of hope in the conflicting claims arena for EcoFriendly Pc’s. Here’s what I learned, from Peter Hopton, managing director of this forward thinking group.
VeryPC were displaying a number of high performance dual core desktops, starting from just 17W of electricity (to put this in perspective, this is about 1/6th of a normal PC, about the same as a thin client).
Specs:
Fulwood (17W!) £800+
2.53GHz Dual Core (C2D)
4GB RAM
250GB HDD
Mac Mini Size!
Treeton (27W) £399
2.5GHz Dual Core (AMD)
2GB RAM
80GB HDD (Ultra small form factor)
VeryPC were also demonstrating their energy efficient server technology, offering ‘Janus II’ a 1u 16 core unit that was demonstrated on a power meter taking only 147W. The unit is actually two 8 core Intel servers, split down the middle and offered RAID 5 on each (using small form factor or solid state disks). Even at full load the whole unit only drew 285W, and offered 146GFlops worth of processing (to put this in perspective an equivalent amount of processing from a normal big brand unit would be over twice this energy consumption).
Specs:
Two Servers, 1u box, each server:
2x Quad Core Intel Xeon 2.5GHz 12MB Cache
4GB RAM (max 48GB)
2×160GB (max 4HDDs)
2x 1Gb Ethernet
The Whole box (both servers running) 147W idle, 285W 100% load.
The more compelling issue, was the demonstration meter, that showed how the net power usage, and Power Factor Correction, was a direct result of the innovative chip level power management technique that makes these Very Pc’s so efficient.
On the other hand, after nearly 30 years of grey boxes, the sleek piano black look, attracted the eye, and drew many visitors into the booth. If this sort of engineering is possible, and the nearly 1.3 Billion Pc’s were to begin an orderly migration in this direction, then we would have a much more sustainable industry.
For more on Very Pc. www.very-pc.co.uk
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