[Techtalk] going green

[Tracey Hytry]

On Wed, 30 Jun 2010 14:59:27 -0700
Maria McKinley <maria at shadlen.org> wrote:

> I am getting pressure from my boss to make our servers/computers "more 
> green", 

- check and replace computer power supplies that aren't 80+
- try to get the cost of the cooling down in the server room
  - can you use outside air instead of air conditioning?
     - be sure it's filtered, dust is bad
- try not to use any hi power video cards in machines unless needed
- replace machines or parts of (motherboard/cpu) with newer low power architectures 
- try to take an energy footprint from each of the machines and work from there
  - get a "kill a watt" and be sure to check the "power factor" of each machine
     - if the power factor is low it probably also has an older (non 80+) supply that wastes a lot of power
   - check the monitor's power use also
- be sure "suspend to ram" is used when machines are not being used
- use "power top" to find out what processes are running when they shouldn't  be on your servers/machines
   - but be careful, some suggestions involving "pci-bus power savings" can cause lock ups on certain hardware

Tracey