Impact of Green Computing

I found an interesting article linked off of Slashdot. As an technology architect I’m very familiar with load balancing strategies and round-robins, but I’ve admittedly never thought about the impact of the load balancing strategy onto power consumption.

It’s very obvious though, by evenly distributing load across servers you end up with many servers with medium load. By assigning more load to an active cluster of servers, a smaller set of stand-by servers could shut down into power saving mode.

That also gives a new meaning to the unfortunate “let’s throw more hardware at it” mentality. Next time remember to bring up carbon emissions when trying to sell a client on spending a little more time on code optimization.

Anyhow, check out the whitepaper right here.

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