Green IT: A case study with the Intel Atom Ion platform

One of the biggest buzz words in IT at the moment is Green IT. IT does not have the best image when it comes to ecology; data centers in particular have a bad reputation because of the massive amounts of energy they use. Hence, when people talk about Green IT they often focus on servers. But if you want to go green, you can't neglect the desktops. Depending on the hardware you use there is much room for improving the ecological footprint of your company.


If you bring up the idea in your next executive board meeting it will get support but one question will be raised: What does it cost? If it involves high costs the support will dry up fast. But going green doesn't necessarily mean more expenditure. If everything is planned well, going green might even save the company some money. Here's an example of how we managed to go green and save some bucks:


Last year many of our desktops ran out of support and their advanced age caused more and more malfunctions. It was clearly time to get new computers. Up to that point we used common desktop hardware. A single desktop burned around 70 W when the desktop was idle; more when the computer was under load.


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Last year many of our desktops ran out of support and their advanced age caused more and more malfunctions. It was clearly time to get new computers. Up to that point we used common desktop hardware. A single desktop burned around 70 W when the desktop was idle; more when the computer was under load.

well 18 & 24 W versus 70 W is definitly going green..good subject..wise choice for atom processors..

Yes, less watts do matter a lot. A friend of mine is also writing a case study on green computing for his masters in software engineering.

He tracks the daily consumption of electricity for a few targeted workstations and evaluates how they are used. Laptops seem to be far less resource hungry in terms of energy but things are changing a lot in workstations as well.

Well, since I mainly use EPIA mini-itx boards since what? 2003, I guess I was ahead of the time....

I just got as a replacement a couple of completely passive thingies (one of those that also use an external power supply very similar to laptop ones) but I haven't had till now the chance to do the switch.

I presume they will fall in the 15÷20W range.


Wonko

You're way ahead of your time.

There will even be a time when people will regard the need for windows to become less hardware hungry and revert back to specs required for windows 2000. So, you're indeed walking on the future while using things that have been available since a long time ago.

Though those Atom machines are great for office work, (A place, where i never understood the upgrade to more powerful hardware, in the first place.) they are pretty useless for home users, where usually only 1 machine exists.
Really useful green hardware, would have to have a 'low power mode' that consume as little energy as the Atoms, but also offer a 'high power mode' for applications that really need every bit of computing power that they can get.

So far economic use of electric power is only possible, with a fleet of computers at ones disposal.

Yes. At the office there's barely a plausible justification to upgrade onto stronger hardware just to keep on doing the same office business.

I remember when we had to acquire more costly workstations just to accommodate Vista for places where all that was needed is running office applications and print them once in a while. A real resource waster in every sense.

Nevertheless, I proposed getting laptop for less cost running Ubuntu with OpenOffice assuring that integration with the other network services was possible. Needless to say that this option was inadmissible as open office was not compatible with Office 2007 documents and users believed that linux/openoffice is complicated.

I'm just happy to see that people are slowly learning that something different is not necessarily complicated and might indeed bring advantages along with "green" savings.

I like Zotac Ion with nvidia (kinda cool for normal, hd gfx when needed and hackintosh-able )

and green!

Yes, slim tops are cool.

Would just disagree on the hackintosh part and adopt Ubuntu instead..