[CS-FSLUG] Quantify the Power Savings (was: A Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection)

[Don Parris]

On 12/29/06, Greg Slade <grgaslists at rogers.com> wrote:
>
> I was reading my usual trade rags today, complete with the Microsoft
> propagand^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hads claiming that Windows has a total cost of
> ownership than Linux. (It still boggles my mind that nobody has sued M$
> over that little bit of book-cookery.) There was also much discussion
> over power usage in data centres. According to one article, 38% of all
> power consumed in the US is burned up in data centres (both in powering
> the servers, and in cooling them), with all the associated costs to
> businesses and the environment. Taking those two together, it wonders me
> if anybody has ever done a study quantifying the electricity savings with
> using Linux vs. Windows. After all, we all know that Windows is bloated,
> and wastes far too many clock cycles in OS overhead. What I'd like to see
> is some lab results showing, say, useful (as opposed to theoretical)
> MFLOPS using the same hardware running Linux vs. Windows to perform the
> same tasks. I'd expect it to show that running Linux allows you to get
> more work done on the same hardware for the same amount of power used,
> but has anybody actually run the tests to put hard numbers on the
> difference?
>
> Greg



This isn't really what you're looking for, but I've attended a couple of
seminars this Fall - one by Novell, and the other by IBM/AMD/Red Hat and a
few other folks.  The big pitch I'm hearing relates virtualization with
energy cost savings.  Quit buying boxes - virtualize your data center.
Obviously, GNU/Linux offers some strength here. :-)

Don
-- 
D.C. Parris
Minister, Editor, Free Software Advocate
http://www.linkedin.com/in/dcparris
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