One Small Server = A Family?

I read this astonishing fact on Oriel's (Australian VMWare reseller) website: that one standard server kicks out about 11.25 tons of CO2 a year. Is this a sane number? That's roughly the average annual carbon footprint of a North American family.

I've seen that number several places, and it's implicitly used in a number of green calculators, including the VMWare one.

It is pretty amazing to think of a family producing that much CO2. I started buying carbon offsets two years ago, and now, with a renovation, we're starting to cut our calculated footprint down (I figure it's 'only' about 7 tons per year now that I'm working three days a week at home and we've retired one car).

7 tons is way less than average. Keep going!

That must depend a lot on the server and the electrical utility. Where I am we use hydroelectricity which may have some CO2 cost during construction and displacing trees but it is a lot less than burning oil in a diesel generator. I remember a few years ago living in a house with wood heat, that we did not burn that much wood in a year. It was about 3 tons of wood which comes to less than that as CO2.

I also use geothermal heating so I use several times less electricity for my heat because I am using the internal heat of Earth and solar heat for most of it.

I am also less concerned about servers than client machines. One server can serve hundreds of clients simultaneously so the bulk of the power consumption is at the client end. I recommend thin clients with a tiny CPU, little memory and no drives or fans to save more power. A thick/fat client may use 140 watts but a good thin client is way less than 10 watts. Unfortunately monitors take a bit of power, just for the lamp but they are improving in efficiency, too. BTW, it is a myth that a thick client is necessarily faster than a thin client because servers typically have faster hard drives/RAID, more memory and most of the files needed for a click already in memory.

Where I work, we have thin clients that take 5s for a login and less than 2s to start a word-processor because most of the files needed are already in RAM because the server has helped people login before you. This is a much more efficient way to operate than thick clients which have a hundred files to peel off a single drive. My servers have four drives and can read four files at once. The drives on the server are fast, too, with 2ms seek time and higher rotational speed.

Don't knock servers. They can save power if used properly.

... particularly as, on the software side, we're less and less concerned about running classic applications and more and more comfortable with the idea that almost anything many information workers need to do can be accomplished in a browser.

Among other things, what I like about a browser computing paradigm is that it sidesteps issues involved in adapting a thin-client enterprise architecture to seasonal workforce expansion, work-at-home, job-stacking and other logistical speed-bumps, and may even soften resistance to moving away from the one-user/one-PC paradigm from older technology populists, who reflexively view thin clients as 'lobotomized, locked-down PCs.'

BINGO! Many do not know what a thin client is and many who do remember terrible performance over 10baseT networks from a mainframe with 16 MB RAM.

"Thin clients" these days come in many varieties. Some boot PXE and need a server to supply them software. Others come with a little OS and a browser installed and configured on SSD or any of a dozen combinations of protocols. HTTP is very familiar as is the browser. If you are tweaking databases through a GUI or doing e-mail or sharing documents, a single client makes sense. It makes no sense to maintain version x.y.z of client WerbleSnerk from company PQR for every application in the place. It is faster to do lots of things on the server and the browser and hypertext is a tool requiring little training.

Where I work, half the job can be done with a browser and the other half with an office suite, ANY office suite. Eventually we will have a good web app for documents (this year likely), and the need for an OS as a platform will be gone. We can do very well with current thin client technology but the way cloud computing/netbooks/smartbooks/Moore's Law is going we will converge to something on the server within a year or two. We still need to optimize and consolidate those servers but that is an easier job than getting desktop users to change what they think/feel they are doing.

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