Wednesday, May 23, 2007

Global Warming A Growing Concern


I hope, every one know about Global Warming and the its increasing effects.

No, No, do not get surprised, I am not growing to write about the climatic changes of our Earth in my post, but rather I will stick to my title which is “Technology”. In this post, I will be writing about how Technology can help in reducing Global Warming and its ill causes. The WHO is organizing many campaigns to create awareness among us regarding the hazards of Global Warming.


Hardware


Dell’s Contribution




Do you remember, Last year, in the month of December, Dell has introduced its new range of servers called Energy Smart Servers to reduce power consumption. The Dell PowerEdge Energy Smart 1950 and 2950 can deliver up to 25 percent greater performance per watt while reducing power consumption by 20 percent. According to Dell, these improvements can save hundreds of dollars per server every year, which can translate to millions of dollars per year in large data center deployments. They also disclosed that the New PowerEdge Energy Smart servers combined with Dell OptiPlex desktops and Dell's industry leading-services, partnerships and sustainability programs deliver on our commitment to drive energy-efficient solutions that increase performance and reduce power consumption from the desktop to the data center. If your company uses Dell hardware, you might be aware of the recently announced OptiPlex 740 and 320 desktops joining Dell's Energy Smart technology. Especially, OptiPlex 740, which can use 70 percent less power than its predecessors. The new hardware from Dell include low-flow fans with a power speed control mechanism, higher-efficiency power supplies, low-voltage processors, and factory-integrated BIOS designed for increased efficiency and air flow


If the hardware from Dell would have come a year earlier, enough electricity could have been saved to avoid about 12.5 million tons of CO2 emissions, the equivalent of removing about 2.5 million cars from the road. The potential savings for customers about $1.6 billion in operating costs. If we consider this percentage all over the world, the cause for Global Warming will be drastically reduced. The Dell Power and Thermal Lab in Austin, Texas is a research facility dedicated to the creation and validation of industry standard solutions to today's energy efficiency challenges. By partnering with market-leading companies like Microsoft, APC, Liebert, Rittal and Sanmina SCI, Dell is working to address Data Center inefficiency end-to-end. The Dell PowerEdge Energy Smart 1950 and 2950 servers are available today worldwide. Prices start at $2,449 and $2,619, respectively.


Recent Announcements from Dell

Earlier last month, dell has introduced two AMD Opteron based servers, designed to reduce the power consumption. The actual power consumption depends on the usage, but Dell claims that this server will deliver up to 105 percent greater performance per watt over the previous generation servers and hence, Dell calls it as 9th Generation.


Hewlett-Packard

Its Not only Dell that is coming forward to reduce Global Warming, but there are other major hardware vendors as well you might be still using HP’s Blade Servers. Hewlett-Packard came up with a new technology called Dynamic Smart Cooling for datacenters in which, Heat sensors on server racks send signals to a control panel that adjusts the air-conditioning output. According to Hp, this technology will save power of up to 45 percent.

Dell PowerEdge Energy Smart servers also offer an ideal platform for consolidation and virtualization, enabling customers to balance capacity demand within the same or reduced physical space and price range.


Software


Virtualization, a Step ahead to Decrease Global Warming.


Virtualization has been in mainframe for years, there are lot of softwares like VMwar, IBM Advanced POWER Virtualization, Microsoft: Virtual PC and Virtual Server 2005, XenSource – XenOptimizer. Server virtualization means multiple server operating system running on a single hardware.


VMware has gained more importance in its life span of nearly a Decade. It offers, Data Centre products to reduce costs through more efficient use of resources. There are many such products from VMware which offers virtualization. Infact, VMware offers some Free products like VMware player using which you can start your own virtualization now.


Recent Announcements from VMware

VMware announces VMware ACE 2 Enterprise Edition, using which you can deploy or create a Virtual image for a pc or a server, infact you can edit it with your IT policies to protect the contents, package it into a virtual machine and deploy it on any managed or unmanaged licensed client. This is the only Edition of VMware using which an IT administrator can manage thousands of VMware ACE desktops and apply policies to all of them using a single console. VMware costs in between $1000 to $15,000



Believe me, Technology can do lot of things to reduce Global Warming. Both Software and Hardware vendors should look into designing such environment friendly products.



For Information Visit the Following links


Moving Beyond Server Virtualization

Microsoft’s Strategy on Virtualization

Server Virtualization

Virtualization Simplified












 
©2009 Technical Herald

The articles are copyrighted to Virasat Khan and can only be reproduced given the author's permission