Green IT Power Management

Figure 2. Plug load in commercial building: mostly PCs

Source: The Cadmus Group(Base case Energy use at NYSERDA office)

In recent history, the United States’ power grid has been taxed by wide-scale power emergencies on the East Coast in 2003 and in California in the early 2000s. With concerns about decreasing oil reserves, energy price spikes and global warming, the IT industry has begun to place greater emphasis on reducing power consumption in data centers and in the hardware used by business customers.

Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (Hitachi GST) has introduced the Deskstar P7K500 desktop hard drive, which offers the industry’s lowest power consumption among hard drives in its class. The Deskstar P7K500 hard drive provides customers with industry-leading power consumption – up to a 40-percent improvement over previous-generation products – by reducing power in both idle and active modes. This reduction was achieved by using the same system-on-chip (SOC) that is used in Hitachi’s Travelstar™ 2.5-inch mobile product line, where low power has long been a key design attribute to maximize battery life in notebook PCs. This SOC incorporates Hitachi Voltage Efficiency Regulator Technology (HiVERT™) in which switching regulators are used in place of the less-power-efficient linear regulators in the voltage reduction processes. Also included in the SOC is a more power-efficient module for the SATA and PATA interfaces.


Power management of company computers presented a significant untapped opportunity for conservation. Dell is firmly committed to meeting energy conservation benchmarks in manufacturing its products. The company is also determined to conserve energy within the corporation by improving the power management of approximately 50,000 in-house computers. In many offices, Jay Taylor, senior engineer global strategist at Dell says computers are left on overnight, wasting power for those approximately 100 hours per week that they are not being used. “During the off-hours, those computers are creating heat,” he adds. “And by creating heat, computers require buildings to use more cooling, which uses even more energy. The technology is now available to make significant improvements in conservation, and we set out to deploy that technology to both conserve energy and cut costs.” By deploying to Dell 50,000 client computers with 1E’s NightWatchman and SMSWakeUp applications, which save files and closes applications and shuts down or places into sleep mode computers in the Microsoft Windows environment while preventing data loss and application errors, Dell expects to realize up to a 40 percent reduction in computer-related energy costs, which could translate into US$1.8 million in savings annually.

Reference:
Dell on Dell: Energy Efficiency from http://www.dell.com/downloads/global/casestudies/688_2007_DellonDellEnergy_79991399.pdf

http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G1-170101873.html


Dr. Jim Wong(2008) Technology Innovition for Eco-friendly HDDs from http://www.hitachigst.com/tech/techlib.nsf/techdocs/7488DD18DCFAAB91862573790003DB44/$file/Eco-friendlyHDDs_wp_final.pdf