by Michael Smith (Veshengro)
A lot is being talked about how reusing items is usually greener than recycling, and the more an item can be reused, the better.
This is definitely the case for electronics, since throwing them out or even trying to recycle them leads to environmental harm. One nation, it would appear, may just be a leader for this green practice, and that nation is Peru in South America.
Electronics shipped off to developing nations for "recycling" are often still perfectly good and usable, and often end up being broken up in a manner that is neither healthy for the environment nor for those doing the breaking up, the recycling.
A study called "Product or Waste? Importation and End-of-Life Processing of Computers in Peru," and reported at Greener Computing, found that that in Peru imported electronics do not go straight to e-waste dumps to be broken up for recycling but rather 85% of discarded computers sent to the country are reused instead of recycled.
While many countries certainly do not practice this kind of sorting and reuse, it is a practice that could certainly help mitigate the impacts of e-waste in developing nations and should be encouraged – alongside, of course, far better reuse, repair, and recycling practices in the developed nations where the e-waste shipments originate.
Why can we not for that at the country of origin, so to speak? Why can we not refurbish and reuse those computers wherever they are sent from? This could indeed be possible if we would not rely on Microsoft Windows and its need to have lots of memory and powerful processors but instead would migrate over to Open Source operating systems that are not power hungry such as Linux in it various guises.
It is my belief that such e-waste should first of not be seen as waste and secondly should be repaired and refurbished, where necessary, for reuse in the developed nations themselves. It can be done but we must rethink our use and our attachment to proprietary software.
The United States is the primary source of used PCs imported to Peru. Analysis of shipment value (as measured by trade statistics) shows that 87−88% of imported used computers had a price higher than the ideal recycle value of constituent materials. The official trade in end-of-life computers is thus driven by reuse as opposed to recycling.
This starkly underscores both the wastefulness of the US when it comes to electronics, and the great benefits of reusing products instead of recycling them. If other areas where electronics are recycled in toxic ways are helped to create a system for tracking incoming electronics as Peru has developed, perhaps we would see a drastic reduction in e-waste and pollution associated with unregulated e-waste processing.
I am also certain that we can find the same in other developed countries such as Britain and Germany, as an example. That is to say that perfectly good computers and peripherals are being sent abroad as e-waste simply because they have become, thanks to Microsoft and other proprietary software makers, “obsolete”.
But what does being “obsolete” mean as far as computers are concerned?
Primarily it means that those computers can no longer run the latest proprietary software from either Microsoft or other companies and hence upgrades are necessary and, as it is often cheaper, for companies and government at least, to buy new rather than to have refurbished those computers end up in the trash.
The same machines can, however, still can run full tilt and work well also in industry and government with Open Source software in general and operating system specifically and there is no need to discard them.
But very few companies and agencies seem to be prepared to go and use Open Source and hence we end up with all those waste PCs and such.
Time to rethink...
© 2009
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Peru makes a big statement about reusing rather than recycling of electronics
Download Your Software instead getting on disc
by Michael Smith (Veshengro)
Software CDs are made out of nonrenewable petroleum products, and are difficult to recycle, though there are ways of re-purposing them but...
They are placed in plastic cases, often of a polycarbonate type (jewel cases), stuffed into boxes with manuals, & all wrapped in even more plastic.
This can all be eliminated if you download the software directly from the company via the Internet instead of shopping for it at the computer software store.
You won’t have to drive, the manufacturers won’t have to ship to the stores, and you can relax. So go green and save resources, as well as time & fuel.
Once downloaded you can store the software, as a backup, on your hard drive, an external drive or you burn the software to CD. Some software that is downloaded, especially such as Linux operating systems come down the line, comes as an ISO, that is to say a CD disc image, and will need to be burned to a CD in order to be able to be installed. That way you also have a full CD, in the same way as if you would have bought it in the box from a vendor, with manuals in PDF and such.
There is a great deal of software out there anyway that you can even download for free, and that includes, as said, entire operating systems, such as the various Linux distros, complete office suites and other stuff.
Much of this, such as Linux OSs and the likes of Open Office office suite, and others, fall under the Open Source Software label while others are so-called “freeware”. The latter often is a restricted version of one to be paid for, or one where the pro-version has more intricate features which most users would never need.
Open Office, for instance, is a complete – bar Outlook and the newest kind of things – replacement for MS Office and it is free and you can install it on as many computers as you wish, even for commercial use without committing any felony.
Then we have The Gimp: a replacement, basically, for Adobe Photoshop. This program is reckoned by many expert users to be superior in many aspects to Photoshop bar the fact that it does not have postscript output. Again, this program is free. Ever looked at Photoshop's prices?
None of those can be bought in a box and all are to be downloaded. Saves money and the environment.
Foxit PDF is a lovely PDF reader that is superior to Adobe Reader in many aspects, not alone for the fact that with Foxit you can highlight and annotate PDFs and it will retain those alterations.
PDF Creator is a free PDF making software that, though not having all the features of Adobe Acrobat, suffices for most people's use. It is used as a virtual printer and creates PDFs as good as the commercial packages. I have yet to discover whether it has the locking facilities that Acrobat has but then it does not cost me hundreds of dollars.
Open Office has a one-click PDF maker built in but it does not compress the data as well as does the stand-alone PDF Creator and therefore, personally, though it is nice to have the one-click facilitiy in Open Office, I tend to go round the slightly longer way – when not using Linux – of using the PDF Creator as a virtual printer to make the PDFs I need.
This is just a very small example of the material that you can download and that you do not even have to pay for. But whichever way; the recommendation is: download rather than get on CD. You then have the freedom to put it on CD at home but...
© 2009
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Black is the New White
A teenager’s invention to help save the planet.
When thirteen-year-old Andrew Davey read a blog by a leading expert in green computing, explaining how changing from a white background computer screen to a black one could save energy, he decided to put the theory to the test. He is now the proud owner of an environmentally-friendly search engine called Ecosmartsearch.com – a search engine with the motto “We are saving energy, now it's your turn”.
Andrew’s search engine uses a black background which saves energy because the computer monitor uses 59 watts to produce the image on the screen, whereas a white or light screen uses 74 watts to display the image. This means that every time ecosmartsearch.com is used, it saves 15 watts. As it is Google-powered the search results are exactly the same but use less energy.
The blog which inspired Andrew to invent his search-engine explains the maths: "Google gets about 200 million queries a day. Assuming each query is displayed for about 10 seconds, that means Google is running for about 550,000 hours every day. If users run Google in the usual full-screen mode, the shift to a black background would save a total of 8.3 megawatt-hours per day, or about 3000 megawatt-hours per year." Andrew realised that was a whole lot of carbon-dioxide that could be saved from entering the atmosphere.
So Andrew got to work. “I've always been good at computers and I had previously made a website for my Dad’s small medal business. I came up with the idea of an eco-friendly search engine as I want to be an entrepreneur and help stop global warming”.
Andrew had been learning about energy-saving issues at Woking High School. When he showed his search-engine to his teachers, they were very impressed and started to use it. “My friends really like it too” says Andrew. “I’m just trying to get them out of the habit of using Google! I think helping the environment is a great thing to do. Every little helps”.
To use Andrew’s search engine go to www.ecosmartsearch.com.
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Developing greener data centres
By Phil Andrews, operations director, Data Centre, Cisco for European Markets
The ever-increasing power consumption of data centres is rapidly putting energy efficiency at the top of the data centre manager's agenda. Even if energy costs and the threat of a shortage of power to support data centres weren't driving this efficiency agenda, the threat of carbon capping and legislation soon will. Reducing the demands being made on the data centre by businesses is not an option so what are the alternatives?
This article looks at a combination of subtle trends driving the impending power crisis in the data centre, strategies and technologies to reduce power consumption whilst meeting the evolving needs of the business, and approaches for the short-term and long-term future.
From barely being an issue a few years ago, the environmental impact of data centres has risen to the top of many IT managers’ agendas. The very real concerns over power consumption need a convergence of technological and non-technological solutions to mitigate/address the issue, says [name to come] from Cisco Systems.
How green is your data centre? Until recently, such a question would have raised eyebrows among IT managers. But with rising storage requirements and the levels of data centre infrastructure, the increase in power consumption of such facilities has been getting harder to ignore in recent years, despite the fact that accurate measures of data centre power use are difficult to come by.
Historically, power consumption has not been an issue for data centre managers for a number of reasons. First and foremost, data centres have often sat at the heart of strategic moves to expand or improve the business, and as such have not usually had to contend with cost-containment measures.
A second reason is that IT divisions have not traditionally had responsibility for the environmental impact of their data centres. Facilities departments usually foot the power bill and are often in charge of implementing environmentally-friendly practices.
Thirdly, there has never been much of a green alternative to data centres. Unlike, say, corporate air travel, you cannot just stop using IT storage systems and expect the enterprise to carry on as before.
As a consequence, some data centres have been allowed to turn into the gas guzzlers of the IT world. It takes about 830 pounds of coal to run a computer for a year. And in the case of servers, research by Intel shows less than 20 percent of power actually goes to the CPU.
This carefree attitude to power use is changing now, though, as companies face spiralling bills to maintain their sprawling data centre operations.
Data storage requirements are currently expanding at a compound annual growth rate of between 40 percent and 70 percent. Server use grew by 12 percent in 2005 and is expected to increase.
As a result, energy costs are expected to mushroom from 10 percent up to 30 percent of average IT budgets, overtaking all other forms of data centre expenditure and meaning IT managers will effectively loose a fifth of their budget to power consumption.
Exacerbating the problem is the fact that cooling tends to become less efficient as power consumption rises. The simplest way to increase cooling to a given rack of equipment is to simply open up more floor tiles.
While this is simple fix in the short run, it does not work much above two or three because cooling air being provided to one rack will be ‘stolen’ from adjacent racks, reducing the amount of cooling provided to neighbouring racks.
Another reason is that as more floor tiles are opened up for a particular rack, the distance from the tile to the rack increases. The cooling system ends up being less efficient because it ends up cooling the atmosphere in the data centre in addition to the equipment.
Both of these effects result in higher cooling bills, a reduced ability to cool equipment in the data centre on a per-rack basis and a less efficient cooling system.
Since cooling and heat removal are typically growth constraints in the data centre, this wasted cooling capability will act as a drag or a cap on growth.
Over the next three years, says Gartner, 50 percent of large organisations will face an annual energy bill that is higher than their yearly server budget. Google has already notoriously reached this point. And it gets worse.
In 2005, the University of Buffalo paid US$2.3 million for a new supercomputer, only to find there was not enough power to switch it all on.
An increasing number of data centre managers are similarly finding that there simply is not enough power available to expand their operations any further.
Gartner says most data centres are now operating at 100 percent capacity in terms of power and cooling, versus 70 percent capacity for data storage, meaning that energy, not memory, is now the main limiting factor on growth. (Availability of suitable space is also an issue.)
This puts data centre managers in a difficult position, since demand for IT storage is not going to go away.
If anything, compliance requirements such as the banking sector’s Basel II or Sarbanes-Oxley regulations, combined with the need to roll out ever faster and more complex IT applications, are increasing the demand for data centre services.
As a result, the only way to go is to cut power consumption and thereby reduce the environmental impact of data centre operations. Doing this is not easy. The actual amount of power required by data centre devices is only part of the equation.
Each watt consumed by IT infrastructure carries an additional ‘burden factor’ of between 1.8 and 2.5 for power consumption associated with cooling, lighting, conversion and distribution, all essential energy-consuming services that have to be taken into account in efficiency plans.
In addition, simply checking the power rating on the back of a device will not necessarily give you an accurate picture of how wasteful it is; its processing power and utilisation are also critical factors in determining its overall efficiency.
Because of all this, it is not easy to accurately measure and track data centre power consumption and even now few IT managers are building operating efficiency considerations into their purchasing criteria, although it is likely many will need to soon.
The good news is that recent developments by equipment vendors have led to a number of innovations that can help data centres run more efficiently. Server manufacturers, for example, are looking at introducing variable power consumption based on CPU activity.
The beneficial effects of this will be tempered, however, by the fact that server virtualisation strives to increase CPU utilisation to upwards of 80 percent.
Another option is the creation of blade centres and multi-core CPUs. This will raise the percentage of power going to the CPUs on a per-server basis, improving the overall power efficiency.
It will not necessarily reduce the power per rack, though, without other measures such as IO consolidation.
Where there is perhaps more scope for improvement is in the data centre’s network components, which can be used to create efficiencies in three ways:
- By switching to devices that offer more processing power per watt.
- By incorporating more services into each device, so that redundant devices can be removed from the infrastructure.
- By using virtualisation to ensure that the remaining devices are used as efficiently as possible.
As an example, the efficiency of power supplies for the Cisco Catalyst 6500, the most widely used switch on the market, has improved from 70 percent to 80 percent since it was introduced in 1999.
Forthcoming Cisco power supplies are expected to be 90 percent efficient. At the same time, Cisco is continuing to reduce the power per port required by its data centre platforms, with a 30 percent to 50 percent reduction goal.
What is also significant about many of these new, more efficient platforms is that they can support a greater range of services. This can have a major impact on power consumption.
A typical application server may have multiple appliances associated with it, such as firewalls, secure sockets layer termination devices and load balancers, each with its own power and cooling requirements.
A rough and ready calculation shows these could represent up to an additional 2700W of power and cooling load per server, representing a considerable drain across the entire data centre.
Nowadays, however, functions such as security and load balancing can be incorporated into the network fabric, making it possible to eliminate the appliances and their associated power loads.
Doing this has several added bonuses. It lowers the complexity of the overall infrastructure, making it more manageable, reducing latency and eliminating single points of failure.
Finally, virtualisation can further increase disk utilisation by around 70 percent simply by incorporating all a data centre’s disparate storage devices into a single fabric that is then compartmentalised logically rather than physically.
In a virtual storage area network, each device can be ‘filled up’ to full capacity with data from various sources and applications, so fewer devices need to be used at any point in time.
In addition, the network can give priority to more efficient devices, so that those that represent the greatest drain on resources are only used when absolutely necessary.
The benefits of virtualisation can be significant. Taking a tape subsystem offline can save nearly EURO€3000 in power and cooling per year.
Taken together, these measures could reduce data centre power requirements by up to 85 percent, certainly enough to allow significant further expansion in storage area network use at current energy levels.
Storage area networking technologies can also help reduce server power requirements in a number of other ways.
Aside from power conversion losses, peripheral component interconnect cards and hard drives are the two biggest non-CPU power loads on a typical dual-core server, so moving to diskless servers will potentially remove a 72W load.
This translates into approximately 1.2kW per rack, in addition to reducing costs and improving the availability of servers. Another big area of opportunity is multifabric input/output and server I/O consolidation.
Consolidating storage and Ethernet connections on a single link reduces the number of network interface card ports required on the server (as well as switch ports), reducing the amount of cabling needed and thus improving airflow around the rack.
Furthermore, there are other areas of technical innovation that could help create further savings.
As an example, Cisco has an Automated Power Management System (AMPS) to control energy consumption in laboratories where it develops and tests new equipment.
These labs represent approximately 20 percent of Cisco's real estate, although the testing equipment is rarely used continuously. The system identifies equipment not in use and automatically switches it off.
Separately, Cisco is also partnering with the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory to research technologies that could significantly reduce energy demands, as well as improve reliability and lengthen equipment life in data centres.
The technology eliminates power conversion losses by using DC (direct current) rather than AC (alternating current) power to provide electricity throughout the data centre.
According to Intel, AC to DC power conversion losses account for around 36 percent of the total server power budget in a typical data centre.
On a more general level, using IP networks to monitor and control energy use can help reduce power consumption across the business as a whole, a concept which Cisco has dubbed ‘Connected Real Estate’.
With all this, technology clearly remains only part of the answer to the issue of data centre power consumption. As indicated above, there can be challenges in identifying whose responsibility it is to deal with energy supply in the first place.
Organisations need to take a holistic view of the problem. However, it is a fact that technology can now have a significant impact on power consumption and it makes sense to start assessing developments in this field now.
Currently the power consumption of data centres is not regulated, but with climate change moving inexorably up the political agenda worldwide this is unlikely to remain the case for long.
And there are other pressing reasons to evolve to more environmentally-friendly operations as soon as possible, including the growing likelihood of outages as power and cooling systems come under increased stress.
Specifically regarding the network components of the data centre, there are a number of steps you can take now to reduce power consumption. They are:
- Consolidate networks – fewer networks equals less cost and a reduced storage power draw.
- Avoid gateways and consolidate functions – specialized appliances are not power efficient due to redundant internal cooling, switching and power conversion elements.
- Bring in virtualisation – one network or network element per customer is inefficient in terms of power and space, so consider technologies such as Multiprotocol Label Switching to enable future virtualisation.
- View power requirements holistically and prioritise efforts based upon reducing overall power consumption.
Cisco is exhibiting at Storage Expo 2008 the UK’s definitive event for data storage, information and content management. Now in its 8th year, the show features a comprehensive FREE education programme and over 100 exhibitors at the National Hall, Olympia, London from 15 - 16 October 2008 www.storage-expo.com
Source: StoragePR
Free software for all
by Michael Smith (Veshengro)
Open Source software is the biggest open secret in the IT world.
Open Source software is free, secure, and supported by some of the world's largest software and hardware companies. The software they will be promoting includes OpenOffice, a complete office suite, Firefox, a secure web browser and Thunderbird, an email and calendar manager. Companies that are committed to open source include Dell, Hewlett Packard, Sun Microsystems and Novell.
Operating systems like Linux and BSD are safe and secure to use and some easier than others. The current one that I find, probably, to be the best is Ubuntu Linux in this regards.
At least half of the Internet runs using Open Source software, and many large government departments and companies use open source, including Lloyds TSB, Ebay, NASA, B.T., Bristol and Birmingham Councils to name only a few.
The French Gendarmerie, on local and national level, as well as other bodies have switched over to Open Source software, while, in some cases, retaining Windows as operating system, though in other cases ditching Windows and using Linux.
Elsewhere in Europe we are seeing the same trend of governments, local and national, going over to using open source software, such as OpenOffice, Firefox, Thunderbird, while still retaining Windows OS or migrating over entirely to Open Source, Operating System and all.
The city of Vienna migrated all of its computers, from desktops to server, over to Linux, as, so I understand, did the city of Munich.
They all do it for more than one reason, though the main is, obviously, cost. Open Source software can be installed on as many machines as wanted without the need of paying the likes of Microsoft a separate license fee for basically each and every machine that you wish to install a program on. The other reasons are security as the majority of Open Source software is very virus proof, as well as hacker proof.
At a Hacker Convention in the United States early in 2008 they cracked Apple Mac's latest operating system in a few minutes flat; they took a little longer to compromise Windows Vista and after seven days they still had not managed to get into Ubuntu Linux. That, I believe shows something.
Open Source software also is potentially green. Why is it green and environmentally friendly? No, this is not greenwashing in the making by this writer. Open Source software is potentially green because with Open Source older PCs can be rescued and kept running to nigh ad infinitum. While Vista requires fast processors and huge memory and loads of hard disk space to install upon Ubuntu, for instance, comes on a normal CD of 700MB and that is not even all used by the software. Some Linux operating system have and even small footprint, so to speak, as they can be installed with 50MB and can, literally, be run from a thumb drive, such as Puppy or Damn Small Linux (DSL). However, having said that, on Windows, for some reason, OpenOffice above version 2.0 seem to be needing a huge amount of RAM, thereby making problems, unless one upgrades the memory of the PC which is, if one can, anyway a good idea, considerably.
If the memory is low, so I have found, then OpenOffice 2.3 for instance, is very memory-hungry which froze my PC again and again and I switched back to OpenOffice 2.0. That version is the same that comes bundles with the Ubuntu Dapper Drake version that sits on the PC that runs Linux and it is, like the operating system itself, very stable and happy and keeps just chugging along nicely.
It would appear, from what I keep seeing, that the old Dapper Drake of Ubuntu, even though there have been a fair number of upgrades since as versions go, is still the most used Ubuntu distribution in use. I certainly must say that for the writing work of mine I love it simply because it does as it is “told”, so to speak, and gets on with it.
Join the Revolution! the eco-friendly computer software revolution, and get some freedom onto your PC.
© M Smith (Veshengro), June 2008
Dump that screen saver
by Michael Smith (Veshengro)
Dump those flying toasters and endlessly looping slide shows. They may be doing more harm than good.
In today's world the screen saver is no longer needed, and it has not been needed for many years now. Our monitors are no longer the ones that can end up with so-called screen burn or burn in, as the old green and gray ones once did. So, why do you still use a screen saver.
You do not still use a screen saver, do you?
All I can say is, kill that stupid screen saver. In the “good old days” of tube monitors, and here I must add, the mono-color monitors and the early multi-color ones, screen savers, such as those unforgettable flying toasters, were invented to prevent burn-in, a permanent shadow branded into the phosphors of your monitor by a static image of, say, a spreadsheet that had been left on the screen all weekend.
Today's flat-screen LCD monitors don't burn in and neither do the other variety of the CRT tubes, the more modern ones, any that are less than say eight years old, so if you still have flying toasters or an endlessly looping slide show of your adorable niece and nephew, you're behind the times. When you're not sitting in front of your monitor it should be off off off. Wither turn it OFF physically by means of that button on the monitor; it is there somewhere, I promise, or by means of the power save function of the PC. But, the screen should be off, as in black and nothing happening.
Telstra, the biggest telephone company in Australia, has removed all the corporate screen savers from the 36,000 computers in its offices. What, actually took them that long. I mean, they still had “corporate screen savers”?
So, now that they are gone, what will happen? The change will cut tons of CO2, it is claimed will, which will be the equivalent of taking 140 cars off the road for a year.
Obviously, the Telstra's figures only add up if everyone turns the monitor off when they are not sitting in front of it and actually doing some work on it.
So, let's follow Telstra's example. Let those flying toasters crash and burn.
I have been turning off monitors – either manually or by means of the power control of the PC – for years already. I have never ever been able to warm to screen savers of whatever kind, I have found then stupid in the extreme and also a drain on resources, and at times found them to freeze up the PC and crash it.
While, when using a CRT monitor it took a while for the monitor to be fully there again with today's LCD monitors there is no time lost even if one but turns the monitor off physically, at the switch.
So, lose that screen saver and do your bit for green IT.
M Smith (Veshengro), June 2008
Students rehab old computers for families in need
by Margarita Raycheva
Students in the technology club at Gov. Thomas Johnson Middle School opened their Christmas workshop a few weeks ago.
Instead of toys and games, they stocked up on donated computers. Then, they rolled up their sleeves, and armed with new software and cleaning supplies, set off to refurbish and turn the computers into functional and much-needed presents for needy families in the area.
The idea is to finish before Christmas so that students who don’t have a computer at home can use one to study during winter break, said Anthony Bollino, technology coordinator at the school.
‘‘[The computers] are not going to be something that you can go home and play Halo 3,” Bollino said. ‘‘But they will be able to do school work.”
Bollino started the project together with 15 students in grades six through eight in the school technology club. The group hopes to have 16 computers cleaned and set up with new software by the beginning of December.
When the first batch of computers is ready, Bollino’s students will write letters to financially disadvantaged families in the community and invite them to take advantage of the initiative.
The project, so far, has been successful among students who get to learn about computers while clocking in hours for community service, Bollino said.
‘‘They like ... learning how to set up a computer with an operating system and software,” he said.
In the coming weeks, Bollino’s students will be working with Chris Gregan, founder of Aptenix Open Desktop Consulting in New Market, who offered to teach students about open-source software.
Open-source software allows free access to applications equivalent to systems such as Windows XP, Microsoft Word and Microsoft Office.
It was developed as an alternative for small businesses and nonprofits that don’t have the resources to equip computers with expensive versions of these programs, Gregan said.
When he starts working with Bollino’s students, he will help them set up the 16 computers with software, which could otherwise cost up to $2,000, Gregan said.
‘‘I’ll be walking them through the basic installation of an operating system,” he said.
The special software will equip the computers with programs allowing students to write papers, make PowerPoint presentations, do basic video and photo editing and even manage a family budget, Gregan said.
With the help of the community liaison at TJ Middle, Bollino has already identified some families that may be interested in trying out the computers.
If more students and families express interest, the technology club may be able to prepare a few more computers, Bollino said.
‘‘We do serve many families that are economically disadvantaged,” Bollino said.
To find out more about the initiative, contact Anthony Bollino at Gov. Thomas Johnson Middle School at 240-236-4900.
Source:
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