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Software, an Energy Monster???

According to a representative of the Software Improvement Group; “software is a monster that consumes extreme amounts of energy. Despite this, developers do not seem to be interested in the energy consumption of their products. By developing “green software”, companies can save up to 40%. This is one of the reasons why we started the Knowledge Network Green Software (KNGS)”.

One of the recent reports I read stated that in most western countries, the IT Industry produces as much greenhouse gasses as the airline industry (and consumes the energy that is generated by producing these gasses) , so there seems to be a lot to gain!!

But hold on, is it really just a matter of inefficient (sloppy) software, or is there more? I am sure all of you can think of at least 5 things that could help save our company money, most of which have nothing do to with efficient code, but everything with a “less optimized use of IT assets”.

Let me illustrate this with an example; Every night, we extract and move terabytes of data from our production (IMS, DB2, IDMS) databases. We then transformed that data into databases used on distributed platforms to "feed" BI applications, distributed applications, web farms, Cloud Applications etc. Has anybody ever figured out how much money could be saved if we would get the majority of data straight from the mainframe? We could get rid of servers, storage, network devices, the lot.... How about this one; 30-45% of our distributed servers are now virtualized, using up to a maximum of 55% of a multi core blade running any of the popular hypervisors. That’s 45% unused power, cooling etc...

Let me get this straight, I am all in favour of people writing (energy) efficient software. Most of the software I use on a daily basis feels bloated. But a little pragmatism would not hurt. Initiatives to make existing IT Infrastructures more efficient have been impossible in the past 4 years because of budget issues, right-sizing the IT department and IT architects who were convinced everything would run better on a (virtualized) Windows server. Fit-for-purpose should be today’s mantra for everybody who is serious in making IT more efficient and cost effective. So start measuring where your real energy consumption really takes place (see Ecometer for solutions that help you do this). Leave as much data where it is today, and access it from devices as close to the data as possible.

  • Move what makes sense to Linux on System Z
  • Move every distributed server that accesses data residing on the Mainframe to a zBX blade connected to the zEnterprise
  • Allow distributed applications to access a replicated copy of your production database ON the mainframe.

Trust me, you will be able to play table tennis in your data center again and the use for power and emission of green house gasses will drop significantly..And guess what, it will start saving money almost immediately..... Read more on Cross Platform Application Performance Monitoring here

Views: 460 | Published Monday, November 28, 2011 1:19 PM by Marcel den Hartog
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Comments

Tuesday, November 29, 2011 11:42 AM by Financial planning

# re: Software, an Energy Monster???

This was precisely the answers I'd been searching for. Amazing blog. Incredibly inspirational! Your posts are so helpful and detailed. The links you feature are also very useful too. Thanks a lot :)
Sunday, December 18, 2011 3:16 PM by Freek

# re: Software, an Energy Monster???

You are perfectly right when you ask the question "is there more?" (than green software alone). The answer is of course definitely yes - the example that you give (the one with the terabytes) is just one very nice example of 'wasting' computer power. (Although there could be reasons, like manageability, or traceability, or stability, or whatever what, to keep things the way they are now.) However, the point made by the Green Software group is that energy efficiency of software has been largely overlooked, at least in the recent past, by the IT sector. Energy efficiency in IT is not only just a matter of datacenters with low PUE ratings. We are only at the beginning of the 'green software' field and yes, we should be pragmatic about that. Let's start with the 'big spenders'. The energy efficiency of notepad.exe will no doubt have no impact whatsoever, but when a large social network site switches from php to a c++ compiled variant and saves 40%, that's something that should set all us IT people thinking!
Monday, December 19, 2011 9:19 AM by Marcel den Hartog

# re: Software, an Energy Monster???

Freek, you are absolutely right. Speed has two meanings and unfortunately, speed has been mainly associated with: "let's get it done quickly", instead of "let's do it in the most efficient way".

When using the right tools (either to measure or to build) a lot of today's inefficient software can not only be discovered, but we could also prevent it from being put into production. And unfortunately, this starts at University where people are more often measured on functionality alone instead of on the combination of functionality AND speed.

years ago, my company sold a product called Optimizer. It took compiled Cobol code and optimized it. Sometimes gaining up to 30%. Maybe it's time to create something like that for other (more modern) languages?

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