Interview: How can energy be saved quickly and sustainably in IT?

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interview how can energy be saved quickly and sustainably in.webp.webp
interview how can energy be saved quickly and sustainably in.webp.webp

It doesn’t always have to be the big conversion projects. Whether admin, user or developer: there are quick measures for saving energy for all parts of the company IT.

The energy crisis is currently forcing everyone to save. This will probably not change in the foreseeable future. In the corporate context, this poses a challenge for those companies in particular that have not yet paid close attention to their resource consumption. iX editor Susanne Nolte has dealt extensively with quick wins in IT.

Susanne Nolte has been working as an editor at iX for over 20 years. For the current title series, she has compiled and written down quick measures to save energy in professional IT.

 

In private, everyone is currently being encouraged to save energy. There, the measures also seem to be relatively easy to implement in some cases. If one thinks of IT, one suspects significantly larger conversion projects that are necessary for effective savings. What simple measures are there that help?

Lots: For example, it can be assumed that 20 to 30 percent of all running physical and virtual servers are zombies or comatose servers, i.e. without any activity or task. These can be forgotten old or test systems or those that you want to keep “just in case”. Such an attitude should really be discarded and the systems tracked down and shut down.

In addition, admins should go back to time limits and the targeted allocation of resources. When hard disk space was still expensive and scarce, there was a quota for every user. Today, every user gets almost everything they want. This is precisely why he no longer appreciates the value of resources and does not use them responsibly. Then of course he can start any number of VMs and then just forget about it. He doesn’t see the consequences of his actions, the amount of electricity they consume in the data center and how they continue to utilize the cooling systems.

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Just as the EU has been artificially reducing the quantity of HFC refrigerants such as R134a for years, forcing the operators of chillers to act in data centers as well, users must also be forced to use IT resources differently. Maybe it helps to show them an electricity bill from time to time, also converted into COâ‚‚ equivalents.

You also address the admins. What responsibilities do you have as the central office of corporate IT?

Of course, the admins must not let up in their efforts either. After the advent of virtual servers, for example, it was believed that the much too low utilization of physical servers, which had previously been at a maximum of 20 percent, would increase automatically through virtualization, without any effort on your part. The result: Statistically, it has fallen – it is now assumed to be around 15 percent – ​​also because start & forget has become even easier thanks to VMs. Utilization does not increase by itself: loads have to be combined in a targeted manner and systems better utilized.

In addition, there is still a lot of savings potential in the equipment and configuration of many systems. All unused components should be removed, for example, because they not only draw power themselves, but also increase the energy consumption of CPUs – for example for PCIe control – fans and power supplies. The attitude “Systems and components that I don’t use don’t eat bread” is completely wrong. The opposite is the case, in terms of energy they are eating the hair off our heads.

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Many suspect the hardware to be the biggest resource sinner in IT – whether on a small scale in the office or on a large scale in the data center. What role does software play in saving energy?

Software has a huge impact on computing, storage and network resource consumption. The differences between individual applications can be enormous. This must be taken into account when selecting software in the future. Comparative load tests with 30-day versions and open source software can provide clarity here. You should also keep in mind that leaner and more resource-efficient software is also more performant. When will we stop being surprised that a browser or mail client has to be 400 MB or a PDF editor 2 GB? This insane development is going in the completely wrong direction.

The developers themselves are primarily challenged here. There are many ways to make applications leaner and more performant. Between the different programming languages ​​and libraries alone there are performance differences by a factor of 100. However, such criteria have so far played no role. That’s why we’re standing in front of this shambles now. If software developers had acted responsibly in the past, instead of being driven by revenue-driven hardware manufacturers for decades and taking every nonsensical programming mode with them, the computing, memory and network requirements would be around 1 percent of today’s applications.

In addition, programmers, like admins, don’t have to carry all the old crap with them. You can’t even imagine how much useless stuff is hanging around in the software. And the attitude “Computing and storage resources? What is that? We have it in abundance” – that belongs first on the rubbish heap. It’s just irresponsible. Hardware resources are no more endless than energy, clean air or clean water.

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Thank you for your replies, Suzanne. Detailed information on energy-saving quick wins for IT and the latest technology in energy-efficient data center cooling can be found in the cover story of the current iX 9/2022 and at voonze+.

In the “Three Questions and Answers” series, iX wants to get to the heart of today’s IT challenges – whether it’s the user’s point of view in front of the PC, the manager’s point of view or the everyday life of an administrator. Do you have suggestions from your daily practice or that of your users? Whose tips on which topic would you like to read in a nutshell? Then please write to us or leave a comment in the forum.