Performance and Sustainability are no Longer At Odds

Dateline: May 31, 2013

Welcome to our Friday WRAP – one thought-provoking idea to think about over the weekend.

A thought-provoking blog about energy efficiency and IT performance was recently posted on the CIO Insights blog network.  Sam Greengard, a professional writer, shared his thoughts on The Next Generation of Green IT,

Today, green computing has gone mainstream in the enterprise. Computer manufacturers design servers and storage devices for greater energy efficiency, virtualization and cloud computing are viewed as tools to reduce data-center energy costs, and CIOs increasingly focus on ways to architect networks and data centers for maximum efficiency…. However, there’s a fundamental problem: As organizations become more reliant on the Internet, networked communication and cloud computing for mission-critical tasks, there’s near-zero tolerance to sacrifice performance for energy savings….

His research suggests that, today, CIOs can have it all.

…The words “performance” and “energy efficiency” are no longer an oxymoron. At the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, the Beacon supercomputer is now one of the fastest and most powerful systems in the world but it is also the most energy efficient. It operates at a ratio of 2.5 gigaflops per watt. Meanwhile, the fastest supercomputer in the world, Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Titan (which uses both GPUs and traditional CPUs to achieve a rating above 10 petaflops), is about 10 times more powerful than its predecessor but draws only slightly more power.

Is sustainability a goal for your enterprise?  If so, how can you marry performance and energy efficiency for your IT shop?

That’s a WRAP!  Have a great weekend!

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