Environmental Misguidings
I’m a huge supporter of schemes that hope to save the environment or at least make a difference to the environment.
I’m also skeptical about schemes that I think are a waste of time because they are either aimed at making somoene a whole lot of money on the back of an environmentally friendly product or because society’s reality is that it just won’t happen mainly because it is not commercially viable.
I always point to Enjo, the environmentally friendly cleaning glove/cloth thingo. It was questionable at best, what advantages that brought to the environment, sure, they say they only sell environmentally friendly products but in reality how many people regularly buy their products and is it enough to save the world… definitely not.
Now there is this article on the Sydney Morning Herald about the IT industry having to start looking at stopping such high consumption of power which we all know is created by burning coal which is bad.
MY issue with this article is that it is misguided and tries to simplify a complex situation into a black and white one. And it also throws in a plug for VMWare’s virtualisation software.
It’s a given that most offices have many computers, usually one per person and that these consume alot of power. However unless you are a big organisation, most companies buy what ever system they can afford without regard for low power processors. Many don’t even know much about computers and buy what is sold to them. And that is the reality of the situation, it’s driven by money, suppliers want you to pay more and you want to pay less, in the end it’s unlikely that small to medium companies are going to end up with an environmentally friendly system.
Furthermore to expect them to is ridiculous. Many still use computers and servers that they have been using for many years. Ones that are no doubt very inefficient in their power use or require alot of cooling and hence adding to the environmental problem.
Sure you can maybe push larger organisations to do so but in the end is it going to make that much difference. Each company may reduce energy consumption per person but with ever expanding companies and ever increasing numbers of companies IS THIS REALLY GOING TO HAVE AN EFFECT.
In reality, like most environmental solutions, their needs to be a government led push either by law or by a reward system. Make people do it or make them want to do it. I’ve always thought that this is where the government is very slow to react, the general public are lazy when it comes to being environmentally friendly, not enough people care if something is made from recycled goods or if its biodegradable. I don’t think the onus should be on the public (because you cannot force nor can you regulate so many people), the onus should be on the manufacturers and the government should be enforcing it because stopping climate change is in the peoples interest.
And virtualisation is not a solution to cutting power consumption. You still need a computer to connect to the server that host the virtual machine and the cooling for the server room and then you have to pay for the virtual machine software which the report conveniently pointed out, can be purchased from VMware.
