Green China

Howdy folks,

No, I haven’t disappeared off the the face of the planet … currently in China extolling the virtues of all things Adaptec to those who will listen or can understand me (no, I don’t speak Mandarin apart from a few common words). Thought it was time to do something about this blog for 2010 in a quick break between meetings.

So, happy new year, hope you all had a good break, etc etc etc.

China is going “green” in a big way. Power reduction is a major focus in this country, much more than I’ve seen in any other country where I travel. Yes, there is a factor of saving money, but also a major emphasis on reducing carbon footprint (it’s a national issue here).

However … as usual I’m finding not many people understand the savings to be made by not running your hard drives in your server 24×7. The ability of RAID cards to stop spinning drives after a period of inactivity is not something widely known or understood, but is viewed with great excitement when it is explained fully.

Just like many countries, there are several periods of the year when servers are not used … the best example is CNY (Chinese New Year) coming to a venue near you real soon. During that period many organisations will be closed for a minimum of two weeks. That’s not to say that people won’t be still working from home, checking emails occasionally or logging in remotely to their servers, but the general rule is that a lot of servers will be idle for a period of time during this holiday.

Now of course they could just turn their servers off for this period, but who does that? Even for the Christmas break in western culture I’ll bet that most companies just left their servers running, with all their hard drives spinning merrily away chewing up electricity, heating the room and causing their cooling systems to run full pelt (especially in good old boiling hot Australia).

What a waste.

I’d like to know just how many people actually utilised the free features in their RAID card to reduce their running costs over the Christmas break (and the coming CNY). I’ll bet it’s not as many as could have. Now the system admin lads just counter this with … I don’t pay the electricity bill … that’s the account departments problem. But in reality you can save your company a lot of money without affecting the performance or functionality of your systems.

So how about it … who out there is “Green” (using power saving that is)?

Ciao
Neil