23. February 2009 by Rick Abbott.

I just published the second in the series of “Green Data Warehouse” articles in BeyeNetwork.  This article, “Top 10 Things You Can Do to Improve Energy Efficiency“, provides a pragmatic list of 10 things you can do immediately to reduce consumption at the system level.

Joe Foley (CTO Illuminate) left a comment on the benefits of “overloading processors rather than I/O”.  The EPA study cited in my article found that CPUs consumed about 31% of the energy in an average system, more than any other component and more than 6 times the amount consumed by disks.  So I think making more efficient use of CPU (and therefore reducing the number of CPUs) would be more beneficial than reducing disk.

Also, I want to thank Scott Humphrey (Humphrey Strategic Communications) for helping pitch my article series to BeyeNetwork.

Posted in Articles | 3 Comments »

19. January 2009 by Rick Abbott.

I just published the first in a series of articles on green computing.  The article was released on Thursday, and provides an approach for measuring the energy consumption of servers and other hardware components typically used to support a data warehouse.  I also discuss how this consumption links to energy usage in the data center.

Next month’s article will be a “top 10″ list of techniques for improving energy efficiency in the data warehouse.  Future articles will explore the energy ecosystem - how managing usage at the component level (e.g., servers, disk drives) impacts the public energy grid. 

It’s not enough for us to make incremental improvements in our usage, we need to make exponential reductions in our grid capacity.  To do that we need to employ smart technology that balances usage against capacity.  I believe that technology is already present in today’s mainstream data warehouse and business intelligence toolbox, such as business activity monitoring which facilitates adjustments in real-time based on historical data.

Posted in Articles | 1 Comment »

17. November 2008 by Rick Abbott.

I just finished writing an article on Green Computing in the data warehouse arena, and am following that up with a “Top 10″ list of approaches to make your data warehouse more environmentally friendly.  I’ll post a draft list here in a few days, but if anyone has suggestions please shoot me an e-mail (rick@360degreeview.com).  I’ll also be looking for quotes or interviews once I’ve compiled my list.

On a related but side not, I’ve been reading Tom Friedman’s “Hot, Flat, and Crowded”, which has given me some perspective on the global energy consumption problem.  Good reading for anyone interested in this topic.

Posted in Articles | 1 Comment »