[BC] Beancounters and Windows 7

[Alex Hartman]

On Sat, Feb 18, 2012 at 1:18 PM, Cowboy <curt at spam-o-matic.net> wrote:
> On Saturday 18 February 2012 10:07:41 am Tom Taggart wrote:
>>all presumably added in response to corporate bean counters looking to save a nickel on electricity. Not something one wants on a computer that is supposed to run 24/7.

>I suspect that if you do the research, it's not beancounters at all, but enviro-wackos seeking to reduce your "carbon footprint" by having the machine ( which is obviously *so* much smarter than you are ) turn itself off ...

Welcome to the virtual world as well. The biggest single cost in any
computing system is power from the wall (the next being the cooling).
Especially in a datacenter that can easily consume 500kVa,
consolidating servers is the name of the game. My former boss started
a business here where he's virtualizing entire data centers. What once
took 30-40 machines, he's got down to 5-10. Thin clients are making a
resurgence in the marketplace, virtual desktops in cubicle farms, and
yes, even some in radio with the coming of AoIP.

Obviously however, if you only virtualize a few things, the savings
probably won't be realized, but if you can do it by leaps and bounds,
it's amazing what kind of savings can be found. Again, my boss, took a
standard customer's "cage" of 3 full racks of servers running at about
15-20% load each, consolidated the whole thing into 8 very powerful
machines, saved the customer not only the rack space rental fees, but
also the port fees, and the power bill went down by 60+%, saving the
customer almost 500 bucks a month in power alone!

Now, of course, doing things like this also increases machine density,
if there's a physical failure on the machine, there can be problems,
but there's ways around this with the newer VM systems out there. (IE,
you can "move" the guest VM from one CPU to another if the VM file is
hosted on some central redundant storage.)

It's very cool to be in the computing industry right now because of
this. Microsoft even has their own version of VMware, MS Hyper-V.
While not nearly as robust (IMO) as VMware, it does get the job done.
I've done several things like this at my "day job" and eliminated the
need for entire workstations within the office. What would have
required 2-3 workstations, i've moved to moderately powerful servers
and am only using about 300w of power doing so. (Each desktop was
about 400w out of the wall) Hell, i've even fully virtualized MacOSX.

Now, all that being said, is it the bean counters? Partially. Is it
the environmentalist nutjobs? Partially. Simply put, it's a business
decision. You're in business to make money doing whatever it is you
do, as cost effectively as possible. If you can scale down the
computing force in a typical office setting to a few servers and some
20w thin client monitors, not only do you save on power, but cooling,
hardware, personnel (no desktops, no need for the staff to support
them, right?) and a few other things. From a sysadmin's point of view,
it's really easy in a virtual environment to do "rollouts" and patches
because the workstations and servers tend to share resources, or in
some cases, live on the same hardware with each other.

But what do i know, i'm just an Engineer.

--
Alex Hartman