Peter's Technology Trumpet

Increasingly people complain of hot laptops. My colleague James regularly scorches his fingers on his power supply.

Indeed, your lap is a dangerous place to put the average Pentium M 2GHZ based notebook these days, with the trend to larger memory, more powerful graphics subsystem and hotter running processors.

People and businesses like portable computers - perhaps because of the trend towards more mobile working. Business laptop shipments are increasing 30% annually and its estimated that 40% of European workforce is mobile. In the meantime consumer demand for notebooks is growing unabated, with laptops occupying half the display space last time I visted PC World.

The positive side effect of this trend is that individuals are forced to think more about power consumption..

Windows Vista lets PC hardware, especially laptops, their processors and peripherals, use less energy. Through full support for "Sleep" mode, Vista can reduce your PC into a low power vegetative state, with the processor ticking over and memory running on a pilot light. My laptop (the infamous oversized Toshiba M4 "fan heater") switches into this mode when ignored for 5 minutes, and is restored following a lift of the lid in less than 10 seconds. For desktop PCs, Vista adds a hybrid sleep mode to address memory volatility as, unlike laptops, they generally have no battery.

Whilst this saves the embarrassment of a flat battery in a laptop, the same power management policy can be set by the largest enterprises to put 100,000s of PCs into suspended animation over lunch. This has the potential to reduce power usage, and hence the organisations energy costs by a significant margin. I heard from a reliable source that a certain large retail bank based in Edinburgh expects power costs to exceed staff costs in 2007. Whilst those energy costs are made up of heating, lighting,  air conditioning as well as computing equipment, reducing desktop power usage with Vista and Sleep will have a significant impact on this - according to Richard Mannion of Microsoft UK, about 760KWh per desktop with CRT monitor.

In Scotland there is evidence that the average punter is thinking more about efficiency. The supermini share of new car shipments increased by 30% last year. This is most likely driven my the increasing costs of motoring, of which energy (fuel) costs are a significant portion - perhaps this spell an end to the Yummy Mummy Blackhall tractor brigade?

The Ferry family doesn't own a motor car - these are nasty environmentally unfriendly objects which are quite unneccessary if you live choose to live close enough to work. This is a point on which Mrs. Ferry and I differ - she maintains that they are needed for those "absiolutely neccessary" journeys between home, nursery lunches, and tennis club.

However, the household is guilty of running many inefficient electronic devices, including a file/print/telephony server which is switched on all the time. But that's nothing compared to the energy consumption of a typical organisation's computer room.

These are stuffed with Intel and AMD based PC servers and storage, running 24 hours a day, with the typical processor running at less than 15% utilisation, fed by a power supply running at less than 70% efficiency.

Indeed, datacenter space is often limited not by the ability to stuff more servers in, but by the means of getting heat out. Its not unusual to see IT professionals in shorts and T-shirts sweating cobbs as they administer care and attention to these racks of inefficient servers, each with a heat output similar to a patio heater. Incidentally, if you own and use a patio heater, I can confirm that you will go to hell. 

Like the american auto industry, it has taken some time for energy efficiency in the PC server industry to gather momentum. So it was refreshing to see that the Green Grid, a cross-industry group including AMD, Intel, HP, DELL and Microsoft, have got together to address this issue.

Link to Tech Giants to Unveil Power-Usage Plan - WSJ.com

Sensibly, the group will focus on a common scale for measuring energy efficiency in the datacenter. the issue must be simplified to a level that the busy average datacenter manager has time to understand. It wasn't until the EU energy efficiency labelling was implemented for some consumer electronics that the average punter had any idea of the energy usage of a TV, fridge or washing machine.

Aside from the energy cost issue, organisations are under increased pressure from their customers and shareholders to reduce their impact on the planet. Grant Management, a successful property management and investment company with offices and operations across the UK, is a classic example.

Returning from a New York lunch with Bill Clinton, Peter Grant returned to Edinburgh inspirted to make his company carbon neutral. He acheived that within a few months through energy efficiency measures and carbon offsetting. Being an entrepenurial chap, he has also set up another company to let others do the same at http://www.globaltrees.co.uk/ . If you are are a naysayer on matters of global warming then take a look at his graphs - scary.

There are numerous examples of increasing awareness of energy issues around the Western world. The government of Australia recently announced plans to subsidise replacement of incandescent lighting with low energy light bulbs (following earlier vision of Fidel Castro of Cuba). Closer to home, the Scottish parliament have made available funding for green energy schemes. Tony Blair has reaslised that if our energy usage continues to grow at the same rate, the UK will need a few more Nuclear power stations ASAP.

Deployment of computing power in the datacenter and the living room is increasing exponentially, and rising energy and environmental costs compound the probelm. Sooner or later the focus will switch to the IT industry to make its contribution.

So allow me to make a suggestion - There are around 200 million PCs capable of being upgraded to Vista in Europe right now. If the governamental and energy industry bodies who are currently directing funding to energy efficiency schemes were instead to drive Vista upgrade for all of these PCs, then maybe we could realise energy savings of the order of 200,000,000*760KWh which translates to about 17MegaWatts.  

Factor in the double bubble effect of all the HVAC systems removing this waste heat and this would let us turn down the wick on a few coal fired power stations.

When Longhorn and Windows Server Virtualisation is released to the world later this year, similar technologies could knock a billion dollars or so off the $7.3B global datacenter annualised electricity costs.

In the meantime, consider installing Vista on your laptop, or making sure you power down before you go home :-)