Green IT for Dummies®

Chapter 9. Racking Up Green Servers

In This Chapter

• Dissecting servers in search of green

• Judging a server by its cover

• Calculating ways to use your servers more efficiently

Servers are the workhorses of IT, whether the data center serves 10,000 employees or 10, therefore much of an IT administrator's time is spent on the servers' care and feeding. Most computer users are unaware of the role servers play in delivering the applications they use every day — they see only the application's user interface, not the underlying server infrastructure.

Servers are also the largest generators of heat and consumers of power — although, to be fair, storage is also a large contributor to these problems, as we relate in Chapter 11. It's also fair to say that the companies that manufacture servers have been working on these power consumption problems for many years. Today's servers are far more efficient in terms of the amount of power they consume, but because doubling or quadrupling the number of processors adds heat, the savings in power consumption tend to be offset.

In this chapter, we tell you about different server options and how they impact energy use for a given level of performance.

It's Not Easy Being Green: Dissecting a Server's Core

To get to the heart of how to make the servers in your data center greener, it helps to know what you're dealing with — both in terms of your current servers and what you can expect to buy in the near future. This part of the chapter tells you about the main ...