If you have class, don't fly business class

[maarten]

When we were checking in for our trip to New Zealand, I was hoping that we might get upgraded for the long flight from San Francisco to Auckland. I'm tall, I have trouble sleeping on airplanes, so it'd be nice to have the better seats. We didn't luck out, and in retrospect, I'm glad

Comments

[dreamerfi]

There are tougher choices to be made

True, but they're not always possible. My business is hosting. I could stop doing that altogether and have no income, or I could (and I do) host in a data center that has this:

http://www.evoswitch.com/en/the-green-fan/

Would that be acceptable?

[maarten]

Ya know, while the aggregate hosting of internet services amounts to a lot of power consumption that we didn't have 20 years ago, it's not the biggest thing I'm worried about. For one, because anything that's electrical is easier to feed from clean replacement sources. (Good luck with that electric airplane...) For another, because data centers have strong incentives to keep power usage down.

I'm too lazy to do the math on the 24/7/365 power consumption of your servers, but I bet you burn more than that on your annual trip to Curacao...

[dreamerfi]

My servers: about 20,000 kWh per year, which creates about 10,000 of co2.

My annual flight is about 1600 kg of co2.

Guess which one I wanted neutral first?

[dreamerfi]

10,000 kg, of course.

[maarten]

Interesting, somewhat counter-intuitive.

20,000 kWh/yr = 2.2 kW consumption on average. That seems like a whole LOT of server. Average consumption for a decent racked machine is, what? 50-100W? So 15-20 servers plus a bunch of routers and other junk?

[dreamerfi]

Sounds about right - and a couple of the servers are 16-disk raids, and there's couple with two quad core xeons, and those tend to draw quite a lot of power as well.

[dreamerfi]

Oh, and I've got one full and one half 19" rack in the datacenter :-)