America wastes gazillions with always-on PCs
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Switched off to the environment Next time you leave the office, turn off your machine. According to a new report, the typical mid-sized American business wastes more than $165,000 a year in electricity costs thanks to PCs left on through the night. Thatâs more than $1.72bn in wasted funds across the country.â¦
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Google and Intel are leading a consortium of companies in an effort to reduce the amount of power wasted by personal computers.
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InfoWorld - I've been on a bit of a green kick around here for the past few months. A computer lab is notoriously power hungry, with servers running at 100 percent utilization for days on end, generating traffic or running test harnesses. There are certain areas where I can make some reductions, however, such as collapsing a half-dozen less-utilized boxes onto a single VMware ESX server. There are some other ways, too.
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By Anonymous  Many people hang onto old computers, cell phones, batteries, and televisions because they don't know how to dispose of them properly.
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Many technologies may be a waste of time and money, researcher says.
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By JONATHAN SIDENER Copley News Service  If you asked most Americans in 1985 whether they had any use for a PC with a modem and a hard drive, you would have met with a lot of laughter and blank stares.
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The people who call Dell Inc.&#39;s customer service line often have no idea why their computers are running so slow. The ones who call America Online Inc.
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By Jim Wasserman, The Sacramento Bee, Calif.  Mar. 2--Pity the full-fledged computer store in a retail era when consumers can pluck their electronics off the shelf, along with shampoo and shoes, at big discount stores like Costco and Wal-Mart.
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Give your system more oomph by disabling the services that Windows activates automatically, whether or not you actually need them.
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Plenty of 15-year-olds would be happy to have a personal computer of their own. For Sophie Foreman of Austin, Texas, it's not enough. Her complaint: The PC is too plain.
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Don't look on the Dell Web site for home AMD-based PCs. The company is selling them only in brick and mortar stores or via phone orders now.
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(InfoWorld) - The problem may not rival the movies Poltergeist or The Amityville Horror for sheer terror, but CIOs and datacenter managers are still well advised to deal decisively with so-called ghost servers. Like celluloid zombies, these forgotten pieces of equipment are dead when it comes to improving the bottom line, but they are very much alive when it comes to eating up IT budgets. The unproductive -- and usually undocumented -- servers take up valuable real estate, consume increasingly expensive electricity and, in some cases, absorb ongoing maintenance and lease payments. "You can find ghost servers in a lot of enterprises," says John Phelps, an analyst at Gartner. "And the larger and more diverse the company, the harder it can be to have a single group or technology platform that provides control over all corporate assets." Sun Microsystems, through case studies of two large corporate datacenter operations and anecdotal analysis of efforts with many customers, believes that 8 percent to 10 percent of all servers in large corporations have no identifiable function. In the two datacenter studies, 150 ghost servers were found in an installation of 1,800 servers, and 354 ghost servers were found in an installation of 3,500 servers. One of the companies studied was Sun itself. Sun used system performance tools to monitor CPU utilization and I/O and network traffic, collecting the data over the course of a month, and sorted out machines with zero utilization. Sun removed the questionable servers from operation for 90 days to determine any impact. At the end of the period, it found that 60 percent of the servers could be permanently decommissioned, says Mark Monroe, director of sustainable computing at Sun. The company now conducts quarterly reviews of utilization rates. "It's hard to get people to admit they have unused infrastructure," Monroe says. "It's expensive, wasteful, and having a CIO admit he's got millions of dollars of idle assets lying around could get a guy fired. I think we can remove some of the stigma by talking about the facts, and having people realize it's worse just to leave them lying around." Corporations need to admit "they are like everyone else" and try to reduce the number of idle machines to 3 percent or less, "which is three times better than the industry average," he says. The cost of running a server for three years exceeds its original acquisition cost, so keeping the ghost servers around has an easily measured effect in energy savings. Identifying and eliminating wasted resources are key components of green or "eco-computing," Monroe says. The good news: Advances in asset management and configuration software can help businesses find and shut down these useless machines. And more companies are being proactive when it comes to adopting policies in this area. A survey of more than 300 businesses in the U.S. and Europe conducted by Gartner in 2006 found that 74 percent of respondents said they have a formal software and hardware asset management program. More advanced autodiscovery capabilities and more efficient, effective and accurate search engines mean "there has recently been more focus on discovering the lost and unidentified equipment, especially in industries where security concerns are growing," says Richard Ptak, analyst at Ptak, Noel & Associates. "Every major company I've ever dealt with has had the problem to some level." When BlueCross BlueShield of Florida (BCBSF), which provides insurance services for nearly 9 million people, decided to build a new datacenter in 2005, the company also felt it was time to get a comprehensive look at its asset inventory, says Paul Stallings, senior manager for provisioning services. In addition to the new and existing datacenters, BCBSF also has about 10 smaller server rooms in various locations around the state. The server room equipment was being managed by different departments within the insurance provider, and each had a different way of tracking and documenting assets, Stallings says. Using Aperture Technologies' VISTA tool beginning in late 2005, BCBSF began documenting its IT resources under a single umbrella. "There were definitely undocumented assets," Stallings says. "When you have seven or eight teams managing the hardware, each using a different process, there was really no way to get a systemwide understanding of what we had in our various datacenters." By getting a complete view of its asset inventory, BCBSF has been able to create a formal decommissioning process. When a system needs to be retired, a workflow ticket is automatically generated. The IT department can then start to reclaim floor space, remove cabling and place old servers in pool of equipment that can be either redeployed or completely removed from the environment. As one of largest IT services providers in the world, Fujitsu Services operates seven Fujitsu-owned datacenters in the U.K. with more than 200,000 sq. ft. of floor space, and manages 11 customer-owned facilities. As a result of its outsourcing business, the company has acquired datacenter facilities and IT equipment from a variety of sources, and much of the equipment came with no asset or configuration management process in place, says Mark Scott, global datacenter delivery manager at Fujitsu Services. The company had previously used a configuration cataloging system that recorded only the location of equipment on the floor, but it did not provide any insight into specific use of the equipment. In attempt to get a comprehensive inventory and create an asset management strategy that would allow it to maximize existing datacenter space and continue to grow, Fujitsu Services began working with Aperture to deploy its VISTA datacenter resource management system in 2005, and the company began to see a variety of issues that were wasting resources. "We found we had IT equipment on the floor that people within the company had thought we had gotten rid of years ago," he says. "We looked deeper and found out we were also still paying lease and maintenance on the equipment. We even found that we were paying lease and maintenance on equipment that been removed from our datacenters." By extending the asset management systems across its entire U.K.-based datacenter operation, Fujitsu Services has reduced its operational costs and then passed the savings on to customers, Scott says. Since customers are generally charged for the floor space they use within the datacenters, the removal of unproductive equipment has allowed Fujitsu Services to reduce specific hosting charges for those customers. So, for example, if Fujitsu can reduce the footprint by 10 percent, Scott says that 10 percent savings can be passed along to the customer. The company is also developing the ability to invoice for the actual power required by individual customer installations, versus the current practice of invoicing for power based on the floor space used by the servers. "We also found lots of badly installed equipment," Scott says. The poor installation processes had led to what he characterized as vulnerabilities that meant his company had difficulties meeting customer uptime requirements. "The result was really that we had actually built vulnerabilities into the operation. It was a real wake-up call. We now have a complete vulnerability check and can control installations from the beginning to end." Alticor, the parent company for such businesses as Amway, Quixtar, and Access Business Group, handles IT demands for affiliates all over the world, says Randy Gast, supervisor of server technology at Alticor. The company uses a combination of management tools to keep track of its software and hardware assets, including BMC Software's Remedy service management and Hewlett-Packard's Systems Insight Manager. Using the software, Alticor early last year found that more than 200 servers, or about a third of its 650 x86 processor-based servers, were running at utilization rates of 10 percent or less, Gast says. Even scarier, these underused servers had accumulated without IT knowledge, over the previous three years as new equipment was bought to handle individual applications or affiliate requirements. Working with virtualization specialist VMware, Alticor has embarked on an effort to consolidate the unproductive system and increase overall utilization rates to between 60 percent and 70 percent, Gast says. To date, Alticor has consolidated 150 of the unproductive servers onto seven servers using virtualization software. Alticor has donated the majority of the servers it has taken out of operation during the consolidation effort to charitable organizations. Servers that were too old to be used by groups such as local schools and churches have been sold for scrap. "Using Remedy, we can track the lease agreements for our hardware, when they start and expire, and use it to have automatic triggers that let us know we need to consider replacing certain equipment," Gast says. That said, there is generally a great deal of inefficiency regarding how customers get rid of old gear. "A lot of businesses don't have a disposition strategy, primarily because it's easier to buy" new servers than dispose of the old ones, says Daniel Ransdell, general manager of IBM's Global Asset Recovery Solutions business unit. "Even if you've unplugged the equipment and stuck it in some closet or corner, the business is losing the opportunity to recoup value. Servers aren't like fine wine. They don't get better with age." Energy cost is the major issue that is changing attitudes inside corporations. In August, the Environmental Protection Agency published a report that documented datacenter power usage. According to the report, datacenters in the U.S. consumed about 60 billion kilowatt-hours in 2006, or about 1.5 percent of total electricity consumption in the country. The EPA points out that datacenter energy use has doubled in the past five years, and is expected to double again in the next five years to an annual cost of about $7.4 billion. The EPA says existing technologies and strategies could reduce typical sever energy use by 25 percent, and even greater savings are possible using more advanced technologies. Rockwell Bonecutter, head of datacenter technology and operations at Accenture, believes that a large percentage of the ghost server problem was alleviated when most businesses engaged in extensive Y2k efforts within their infrastructure. In the intervening years, however, there has been a significant growth of systems that operate at 5 percent utilization or less, often because of poor communication and asset management within the company. "When it comes to servers that nobody knows about that are sitting for years and nobody has touched, there are probably examples in every IT environment, but it's obviously impossible to measure what you don't know exists," Bonecutter says. "What we have found is that it is not unusual to find that 40 percent of all servers on a floor could be consolidated and virtualized out of the environment." Consolidation through virtualization has also led to the new phenomena of virtual ghost servers. The ease and quickness with which virtual servers can be created can often leave servers cluttered with numerous poorly documented virtual machines created for short-term or abandoned projects. With tools allowing businesses to get a more holistic view of their assets and policies in place to guide a formal decommissioning process, businesses can now reduce the risk and associated costs of ghost servers, without the need to call on the aid of another great Hollywood institution, Ghostbusters. Computerworld is an InfoWorld affiliate. Darrell Dunn is a freelance reporter in Fort Worth, Texas, with 20 years of experience covering business technology and enterprise IT. Contact him at darrelldunn@sbcglobal.net.
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(InfoWorld) - A group of some of the biggest technology companies said they've committed to a plan to improve the power efficiency of equipment they make and use. The Climate Savers Computing Initiative , which includes companies such as Google Inc., Microsoft Corp., Intel Corp., Hewlett-Packard Co., Dell Inc. and Sun Microsystems Inc., aims to improve the efficiency of power sources for computers and servers and encourage end users to take advantage of underused power management techniques. Only about 50 percent of the power that leaves a power outlet reaches a PC, because inefficient power cords leak energy, Google's Senior Vice President of Operations, Urs Holzle said Tuesday during a press conference to announce the program. Climate Savers has defined a series of standards for power supply efficiency in servers and PCs that it suggests members adopt between now and July 2010. By 2010, the Climate Savers standard will define a power supply that is above 95 percent efficient, Holzle said. The program asks manufacturing members to build products to the standard and companies to pledge to buy products that have the improved power supplies. The improvement doesn't require the development of new technologies. "This is all do-able today with technology we have and know," Holzle said. The reason that vendors haven't deployed such efficient power cords is because they cost more, said Pat Gelsinger, senior vice president and general manager of Intel's digital enterprise group. A PC with a more efficient power cord would cost around US$20 more and a server an additional $30, he said. To address that price premium, Climate Savers is encouraging energy companies to issue rebates to users that buy products with the more efficient power supplies. Over time that cost premium is expected to drop with volume production, Gelsinger said. In addition, end users will save on their energy bills, also helping to offset the cost, he noted. Another component of Climate Savers is general education and encouragement for end users to take advantage of power management mechanisms that are typically built into existing PCs. "Ninety percent of PCs are capable but aren't utilizing power management techniques," Gelsinger said. "We want to drive IT policy in enterprises," he said. Improving power supply efficiencies and the use of power management techniques along the timeline Climate Savers has described would reduce global carbon emissions from the operation of computers by 54 million tons per year. It would save 62 billion kilowatt hours of energy in 2010, worth around $5.5 billion in energy costs, the group said. In its own data centers, most of Google's servers already have power supplies that comply with the Climate Savers standards for 2008 and 2009, Holzle said. Google began investing in the more expensive supplies because "it's worth spending a bit more on the power supply to save on the energy bill," he said. He defended Google's overall carbon footprint, despite questions about company jets that are hard on the environment. He pointed to the solar power used at the company's headquarters and incentives for employees to buy hybrid cars. In addition, he hinted at future energy-saving programs that the company plans to announce soon. Although Holzle said he knows Google's carbon footprint, he declined to share it. Other companies that are already part of the program include Yahoo Inc., Hitachi Ltd., eBay Inc., Advanced Micro Devices Inc., NEC Corp., Red Hat Inc., Lenovo Group Ltd., Unisys Corp. and the Linux Foundation.
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(InfoWorld) - As customers line up toÂ buy new PCs capable of running Microsoft's new Windows Vista OS, vendors like Dell and Hewlett-PackardÂ (HP) are preparing to process a surge of discarded, outmoded computers. Dell advises its customers running Vista Premium to use a PC loaded with a dual-core processor and 2GB of memory. As customers upgrade to meet the new standard, they face a question of how to dispose of their outmoded machines without dumping toxic lead, mercury, cadmium, and chromium into local landfills. "As enterprises deploy Vista, they may increase their rate of replacing, refreshing, or updating PCs, and we're certainly happy to work with our customers on the disposal of machines they take out of service," said Michael Cuno, a spokesman for HP. Vendors like Apple and DellÂ offer free recyclingÂ for anyone returning those companies' old PCs. Dell also runs a network that donates working computers to local nonprofit groups. HP directs consumers to drop-off points at retail stores but advises its business customers to lease their hardware instead of owning it. Dell said it was too early to tell if Vista adoptions would be fast enough to drive a surge in consumer recycling, but the company did say it had recorded an increase from 22.7 million pounds of equipment collected from customers in 2004 to 39 million in 2005. The challenge in predicting future rates is that individuals don't always dispose of their old hardware immediately, said Dell spokesman Bryant Hilton. "We often see, at least anecdotally, consumers who purchase a new computer 'pass down' the old system within the household," Hilton said. "If you have the latest and greatest running your home entertainment center, maybe the system that still works just fine but is no longer cutting edge is good for other household uses. What we of course do not want is the old computer to end up in a closet or storage for the next several years, and that's where the challenge of consumer education comes in." Corporate IT managers who discard outmoded PCs face more complex challenges than consumers because they must also worry about protecting valuable trade secrets and employees' personal data saved on hard drives and because environmental safety regulations vary widely between states or countries, said Jim O'Grady, managing director of technology value solutions for HP Financial Services Americas. O'Grady's division treats that stream of discarded computers as a business opportunity, finding new users to buy 94 percent of the 600,000 computers and parts delivered annually to HP's facility in Andover, Massachusetts. The factory sends only six percent to its recycling plants in Roseville, California and Nashville, Tennessee. Worldwide, HP handles over 1 million PCs returned at the end of their leases each year. That number could jump in 2007Â because customers scramble to upgrade their hardware after each jump in technology -- such as the launch of multicore processors, the advent of flat-panel monitors over CRT (cathode ray tube) monitors, or the sale of Windows Vista. "That's what we saw with dual-core [processors]; it made a big difference. The adjustment had been fairly steady before then," he said. HP accepts hardware from all vendors, often receiving servers built by competitors two decades ago. In the Andover warehouse, workers peel shrink-wrap off pallets loaded with CRT monitors, stacks of Toshiba Satellite and T3100 notebooks, EMC Symmetrix and Clarion storage arrays, and servers like the Appro, Digital Vax and Compaq Alpha. Dell Latitude notebooks and Compaq Deskpro desktops are piled on shelves with their peripherals sorted into nearby crates. The technicians clean dust and rust off the frames and decide whether they can resell the entire machine or just its most valuable parts, such as the processor or optical drive. They prepare hard drives for resale by wiping personal data clean with either powerful magnets, software overwrites, or physical destruction. Most PCs never reach recycling stations. HP says that owners turned in only 7 million of the 70 million computers that became obsolete in 2003, delivering the rest to municipal solid waste handlers, many in developing nations overseas that lack the environmental regulations or technology to process such toxic "e-waste." Â
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As âa direct result of proof-of-concept testingâ indicating that the Washington-based Auto Warehousing Co. (AWC) âcan cut costs, increase system reliability and security, and provide expanded IT support services,â AWC âwill begin systematically pulling the plug on all Windows-based PCs in its cavernous auto processing shop and power up Macs to execute virtually all of its revenue-generating operations. The move comes on the heels of a quiet wholesale replacement of Windows-based servers for data storage and Web operations, which are now running on Apple Inc.âs Xserve RAID machines,â reports Julia King (Computerworld).
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Like the penny, the floppy drive is hardly worth the trouble, computer makers say. -AP
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Many of you can't be trusted with your own computers. Stupidity isn't the problem. It's laziness, mostly, combined with a penny-wise stinginess that resents the $40 price of a good antivirus program.