PCs and your power bill
The modern PC (or laptop, netbook, nettop, smartphone for that matter), is a marvel of electronic engineering, capable of processing huge amounts of data in very short timeframes, collecting and collating data from across the globe in moments, storing, querying and retrieving info from massive databases in milliseconds.
All of this potential instantly becomes moot the moment you remove a single element however. No it isn’t the broadband connection – yes that is a key component today but without it your computer is still a very powerful number crunching device. I’m talking, of course, about power. Electricity. Juice. Without it, the most expensive machine just becomes a very costly paperweight, nothing more.
So, it has to be concerning to us within the industry that Nersa has granted Eskom its massive increases. Not as much as Eskom wanted no, but we all knew this sort of 10% variance (and a lot more) was already built-in to the original tariff proposals from the incumbent anyway, so that hardly fools us. The final word is that the price of power will more than double over the next three years, and therefore the running costs of your all-important computing environment. A bitter pill to swallow for those whose very business model relies on having powerful ICT backbones.
In fact, I’d go so far as to list these increases as the one potential stumbling block which could halt the progress we finally appear to be making in rolling out broadband connectivity on a large scale.
Small, underutilised Internet kiosks in those forgotten underserviced areas now have radically altered business models to deal with, those that do exist but aren’t making at least 100% profit are going to struggle and quite probably shut down as this heavy yoke settles over their necks, even the startup downstream ISPs who are currently driving the broadband price war are going to have to adjust their prices upwards, not what we consumers want, to absorb the increased costs of operation.
Sure, this applies to all industries, none being exempt from the need for electricity, but ICT-heavy organisations are going to be among the hardest hit, besides the mines and their famously power-hungry smelters, which I suspect will just close down or have their workloads halved.
It applies to you, the home user, as well however. As our lives have moved more and more digital, most of us run multiple PCs to satisfy all our needs. There’s a powerful desktop for stationary office duties and occasional gaming, a laptop for when we’re mobile, a smartphone or two for when we’re really mobile, a home-theatre PC, perhaps a small file server, maybe even a home-automation or home-security system in place with more associated “little” servers and control modules, all sucking up electricity at quite a rate.
Now as much as we’d like to stick our heads in the sand and say “These unlawfully exorbitant price hikes will be stopped somewhere, by someone with influence,” you and I both know they won’t. So what’s the answer?
Consolidation has been a hot topic in the server world for years already, and while the eco-friendly argument for consuming less power hasn’t given the process much impetus, these hikes are the perfect reason for companies to get really serious about this practice.
Virtualise all of your legacy servers onto newer, more energy-efficient racks. Run multiple services off of one, more powerful piece of hardware. Capitalise on the improved energy-efficiency of modern components while upgrading computing power. Switch out all those old CRTs in thousands of forgotten cubicles with LCDs.
Consolidation will no longer be the preserve of the larger corporate however, I’d suggest households themselves start considering the practice. My wife’s machine, for instance, is built on three-generation-old enthusiast hardware including the big PSUs needed to drive that potential, but she seldom uses it. It would be no problem for me to consolidate my web server and media server onto a newer, smaller, far less power-hungry machine for her, replacing three Volt-eaters with one frugal device without losing any functionality whatsoever or compromising my own beastly gaming rig.
Which is why I believe for “average” computing needs, i.e. the ordinary office worker or casual home user, the nettop is going to be a big thing locally. Running a low-end desktop as a media-centre? Swap it out for an HD-capable nettop rather for one tenth of the power consumption. An old file server 90% unutilised humming away 24 by 7? Good nettops have the grunt to easily handle this workload, and the lightest of which I was astounded by last week when I visited the SA home of the FitPC 2, consumes just 9W in total under full-load conditions.
They’re pretty affordable too these lightweight PCs. Settle for Ubuntu as your OS of choice, perfect for server duties for instance, and you’ll be looking at under R4K, minus screen of course. And there are models coming which have dual-Gigabit LAN on-board too, which is just ideal for more demanding server roles.
After all if we don’t adapt to our environment, no matter how “fair” or downright challenging this might be, well you know the rest.
PCs and your power bill << Discussion
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