I posted recently on the increasing interest in making IT more green. But keeping control of power consumption and it’s associated side-effects has been with us for some time. Google have been facing this issue and published articles and papers on it some time back. Now, one could argue that Google are an extreme example. But think about this……….
It doesn’t matter how big of a data-centre you have or need, you face the same issues Google does. And those issues cost a lot of money and given that enterprises are concerned with cost reduction, it surely makes sense to pay more attention to this subject.
So far we’ve only talked about the hardware, what about the software? We all know that whilst XML is “more open” (I’d debate even that argument) it costs a lot of CPU time, we also know that due to network infrastructure preferences we do a lot of un-necessary polling which also costs CPU time. And we compound this by what we encourage in modern programmers who’ve never programmed in assembler for a system with maybe 4k of memory and a 1Mhz CPU and thus haven’t learnt to be very careful about resource consumption. Those same programmers are not encouraged to focus on the quality of algorithm selection or design, code is king.
If we are to tackle the power consumption issues, it’s not just the hardware that needs to improve, we need better architecture which can dynamically adapt to platform and load changes (Amazon EC2 anyone?) and a new generation of tools and frameworks but, just as important we need programmers who will raise their head out of the code and view the consequences of their actions from a more global perspective. Business needs to look long, avoiding the rampant short-termism that is a key signature of recent times and realize that focusing harder on design rather than just cranking out code will save them money over time because their systems will be more modular, more efficient and less costly to maintain.
Finally if that’s not a compelling business case, consider that recent history shows the consuming public is starting to demand that car manufacturers etc produce greener alternatives and a well known hardware manufacturer is leveraging this in their marketing. It’s entirely possible this trend will spread to websites where consumers will choose your competitor because they can say “we are 50% more power efficient”.
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