Turning off workstation, sustainability vs efficiency

People are arguing that by turning off the unused corporate PC during the night companies will reduce their ecological footprint and more importantly save money.

Let’s do some math :

• Average PC consumption : 89 W ( can be less.. ok but let’s not argue)
• On average ~1.42 KW are saved during a night (16 hour) :
• One KW in uk = 0.166 € (UK price )
• So we have spent 1.42 * 0.166 = 0.23 cents per employee

Now if we had left the pc turned on he would have a no waiting time to get to work. However if you turned it off you need to wait:

• Vista : 1:12 => 72 s
• XP : 1:02 => 62 s

To be honest I suspect that the average boot time to achieve a ready to use state ( ie, outlook started, Firefox started, word started).

• To be around 3 to 5 mn
• So let’s take the a random salary : 35 k € / year, Its 0.01 € / s

Ok now the table

	Boot time	Ready to use (~3 mn )	Left running during the night
Vista	0.72€	1.8€	0.23€
XP	0.62€	1.8€	0.23€

Conclusion :


I'm biased and exagerating a little but if you turn of your pc you save energy however you waste the company money .This dilemna can be easily solved by using solution that schedule wake and sleep to ensure computer is ready for regular user or for remote system updates.

What i'm trying to demonstrate is that when it comes to green IT, people tend to forget the big picture and focus only on the positive aspect no matter how tiny it is. While put into perspective it tends to be often counter productive for companies and/or for the environment.


You have to be very carefull when it comes to ecological solution and make sure that you have looked at all the different angles before taking a decision.

Google, the kettle and a calculator

The Kettle:

Recently Google made the news with the carbon footprint of a typical Google search which generates about 7g of CO2 compared to boiling a kettle which generates about 15g.

See : Pervasive monitoring of the environmental footprint of network activity by Alex Wissner-GrossThe CO2Stats remains interesting, but the story ends up being somewhat diluted. It turns out to be a fabrication of journalism and shoddy reporting.


And Google's response , the key figures for one search from this post : 0.0003 Kwh per queries or 0.2 grams of CO2.

While these number are a lot smaller than the previous one, the way the article The way they are presented seems to try to minimise the ecological impact of Google searches:

• “this amounts to 0.0003 kWh of energy per search, or 1 kJ. For comparison, the average adult needs about 8000 kJ a day of energy from food, so a Google search uses just about the same amount of energy that your body burns in ten seconds.”
• “thus, the average car driven for one kilometre (0.6 miles for those in the U.S.) produces as many greenhouse gases as a thousand Google searches.”
• Etc..

The calculator:

Now, I m a man with a calculator and I’m not afraid to use it .

Lets recapitulate the facts:
1 search =

• 0.0003 KwH
• 0.2 g of Co2
• 1 kj

Number of search done in the US October 2008 : 7 114 millions

Lets calculate the cost per month :

• 7114 000 000 * 0.0003 = 2134200 KwH = 2.1342 GwH per month
• 7114 000 000 * 0.2 = 1422800000 g CO2 = 1422.8 Tons of CO2 per month
• 7114 000 000 * 1 = 7114 000 000 Kj

Which means per year (naïve approach):

• 2.1342 * 12 = 25.6104 GwH
• 1422.8 * 12 = 17073.6 Tons
• 7114 000 000 * 12 = 85368000000 kj

Now let’s put that into perspective the same way Google did :

• 25.6104 GwH / year ~ total electricity consumption of Equatorial Guinea
  
• 17073.6 / 140 = 121954285 kilometres ;EU standard for tailpipe emissions calls for 140 grams of CO2 per kilometre driven
• 17073.6 CO2 Tons ~ Estonia CO2 emission for a year ( http://www.energy.eu/ )
• 85368000000 / 8000 = 10671000 persons fed for a day = 29 975 persons fed for a year

That’s just for US queries, now if you want numbers for world wild queries in august 2007 google did 37.1 billion search queries.

I let you do the math.

The Dose make the poison:

A sixteenth-century Swiss chemist named Paracelsus gave us the most basic rule of toxicology: "The dose makes the poison." Practically every substance on earth can kill you if it's concentrated enough.

We can easily transpose this principle to the ecological impact of human activity on our environment. In this case Google downplayed the ecological cost of a single search while carefully avoiding to mention the "dose".

Economic growth vs sustainability , 2.0 bites back

Just came across a some very intersting articles that abond in the same way of some of my recents posts:

"..shows that economic growth and carbon emissions are inextricably linked"

"The cold, hard truth is that an ample supply of energy is necessary to grow any business over the long-term, and the storage industry is shying away from the harsh reality that a sufficient amount of energy is, unfortunately, not available to keep the industry growing."

I will try to clarify something in the next post; I’m not against energy efficiency, virtualization or other technology. I think they are actually quite useful and even fantastic in certain case; however I don't like the way they are currently used as tools for green washing. They have a positive impact on environment but are hiding the real issue and allow scores of companies to pretend to make an effort while their real goal is to make an additional buck.

So as a conclusion I will try to get a little bit less emotional about it and try to stick to hard fact and numbers.

Continuing with the transportation allegory

Virtualization provides cheap and accessible servers for everybody (think cloud / utility computing). Cheap and affordable often rhyme with non-sustainable.
Lets have a look at the Nano car from Tata. While its praise for bringing cheap cars to the mass, it also has been hailed as a potential environmental disaster.

Is virtualization the pendant of the Tata car ?

Since most company consider their energy consumtion data as trade secret its hard to evaluate its impact . With cars you can just measure air pollution (or the respiratory death rate ).

Carpooling Vs Virtualization

I realize that my previous post was a little bit too technical to get the message across to a wider audience. So, I decide to use a simple metaphor: What if carpooling was like virtualization?

First, let’s define Carpooling:
Instead of driving alone in your car, you share a vehicle with one or more persons. Benefits include:

• reducing carbon footprint
• reducing the amount of cars on the road
• collateral : reducing traffic congestion and traffic jam related pollution
• reduce gas consumption
• we optimize car efficiency (maximise resource usage)
• reduce infrastructure

We can see here the similitude between carpool and virtualization:

• Instead of persons sharing a car , we have virtual machines sharing one physical server
• We optimize physical server efficiency by maximising resource usage

However the similitude stops here, while carpooling try to remove cars from roads, virtualization doesn't remove server from datacenters. Datacenter floor space is expensive, as consequence, datacenter's owner try to maximise its occupation and efficiency.
To stick to the carpool metaphor, instead of removing cars from the roads, we are just putting more people on the roads while maintaining the same amount of cars. And since vehicles have to transport a heavier load they consume more gas and as consequence pollute more.
We optimize roads usage not server usage. However, some company are applying carpooling metaphor at the datacenter level. These companies have in house datacenters and reduce their numbers by consolidating services within fewer datacenters (reducing the amount of roads ...). But, the number of datacenter consolidated is still marginal compared to the number of datacenters build in the same amount of time.


However, to be totally honest, virtualization technology has some positives side effect on the environment. It still limits the increased environmental impact associated with the exponential IT growth driven by market demands. It reduces the amount servers needed to deploy new services by optimizing their efficiency.

Virtualization: Energy Efficiency vs Energy Sustainability

Virtualization is touted as a key solution in order to optimize datacenter efficiency. It allows clients to consolidate work onto fewer computers, increasing utilization, which can significantly reduce energy and maintenance bills and simplify their infrastructure.

It permits to evolve from computer systems using 5 percent to 12 percent of their capacity toward consolidated system running at 80% (remaining 20%: hypervisor + margin for manoeuvre).


Ok, now let’s have a look at what this means in number:

Before: (Source :"Epa report on server and data center energy efficiency")



After :
It’s a whopping increase from 1.4 Watts to 11.2 Watts. An 800% efficiency increase!!!!!

OK, now if you look at the big picture its only: an increase from 1.4% to 11.2% .. A really small increase of 9.8% . It’s still good but not the silver bullet the marketing drones want us to believe.

But the pitcture get a little darker if we start digging a little bit. Lets get some facts first, from Managing energy and server resources in hosting centers, we learn:

• When server are idle they drawn 60% of their peak power consumption
  
• The power comsumption is roughly linear with the load

Ok now, it means that if we move from an average 10% utilization ratio to a 90% (I roughly added 10% to the 80% for hypervisor related load), we end up drawing: 96% of the peak power consumption.
So far so good, let’s be bold and consider that we achieve an 8:1 consolidation ratio ( the reality is more around a 3:1 ratio) and we are still running the same hardware (while most of the time new , more powerfull, and ressource hungry hardware is deployed).
At the datacenter level it means we removed 7 servers out of 8 servers. An 87.5% reduction, which translate into an approximate reduction of power consumption of the servers by : 81.25 % not to forget that we can also reduce significantly the power , cooling and lightning consumption.


However, if you are a datacenter manager you don't want all this empty space (and unused servers) to go to waste (remember datacenter space is expensive). So we simply re-commissioned those servers for other task, lease them etc...

What do we end up with: a 36% power usage increase of the server’s power consumption of the datacenter + the rest. Roughly a 35% power consumption increase, BUT ! we increased the efficiency.


Now the big question where is the sustainability aspect in that?
Lets have a look at the sustainability definition :

"the quality of a state or process that allows it to be maintained indefinitely; the principles of sustainability integrate three closely interlinked elements—the environment, the economy, and the social system—into a system that can be maintained in a healthy state indefinitely."

Virtualization sustainability check :

• Economy : Check ... More bangs for bukcs, revenue UP , shareholders happy
  
• Social : Kind of Check ... We provide more services, customers happy
• Environment : ... mm nope cannot find it, we are actually consumming more energy.

Result: Fail


Ok , now some will argue that you can turn off unused servers by using smart automation systems in order to reduce the environmental impact. Right .., why would a company would reduce its server ROI?
On top of that, here comes the savior buzzword : the cloud : Unused servers will be pushed into a cloud infrastructure so they can be used dynamically for other task .. No more waste

Moving from green IT to green beret IT

I came across this link and realised that it might not be easy for these guys everyday. So i decided to adapt the famous song :The Ballad Of The Green Berets by Staff Sergeant Barry Sadler

Fighting admin from the sky
Fearless men who code and die
Men who email just what they say
The brave men of the GreenIT Beret

Green wings upon their chest
These are men, ICT's best
One hundred men will patch today
But only three win the GreenIT Beret

Trained to live off datacenter's land
Trained in ups, broadband
Men who code by night and day
Uptime peak from the GreenIT Berets

Green wings upon their chest
These are men, ICT's best
One hundred men will patch today
But only three win the GreenIT Beret

Back at home a young wife waits
Her GreenIT Beret has met his fate
His servers died from being slashdotted
Leaving her his last request
Put green wings on my son's chest
Make him one of ICT's best
He'll be a admin they'll test one day
Have him win the GreenIT Beret.

Green wings upon their chest
These are men, ICT's best
One hundred men will patch today
But only three win the GreenIT Beret