Blogs

With the growing concern over global warming, and sustainable energy usage, organisations and corporates the world over need to find ways to reduce their power consumption and their contributions to CO2, and other greenhouse gas emissions. Governments everywhere are considering introducing penalties for failure to reduce carbon emissions and other harmful waste, while energy utilities are looking to raise tariffs at higher than inflation rates as demand for energy grows with the resultant need to build new plants, as well as their need to reduce their own CO2 emissions.

I am ashamed to admit that whenever I, or the company I work for, bought a computer in the past, I never considered questioning its power consumption. I, like most people, just took it for granted that the machine had been built to suit your average users needs, and that it was as energy efficient as possible;  beside, computer power consumption was so low, that it wasn't something to be really concerned about, or so we were lead to believe.

Our podcast that we did on Linux server and desktop virtualisation is out on Hacker Public radio. Check it out. Any feedback welcome!

Virtualisation is one of the hot IT topics for CIOs around the world. With the credit crunch, companies are looking for ways to save money and improve efficiencies at the same time. Server and desktop virtualisation is one of the technologies which promises to deliver on both these counts.

In 2008 we all got a shock when it suddenly became apparent, when power was cut, that Eskom had failed to plan sufficiently for South Africa's energy needs, and we were told that we were in danger of running out of reserve margin. For months, last year, we had "load shedding", with business experiencing lost productivity, and all of us spending more hours in traffic. Dire warnings were made, government talked about introducing penalties for heavy users and Eskom announced their intention of putting prices up by as much as 120%.