Want a truly green datacenter? Turn off the servers.

You may hate the hype about “Green IT” as much as I do, but the problem it addresses is very real so don’t expect the term to go away anytime soon. There are some interesting stats on how out of control datacenter sprawl is getting in a recent article in eWeek Europe.

In 2020, data centres worldwide will consume about 450 billion kWh and their CO2 emissions (at about 330 million tones) will be equal to those of Portugal, Switzerland, Greece and Sweden combined. Their electricity bills will amount to nearly $45 billion (£26bn).

The demand for computing is always growing, so the only practical way to get more green is to do more work per watt.

This is a big reason why many customers are rolling out Solace technology. We generally get in the door on speeds and feeds, but we get picked and purchased based on our ability to reduce costs and shrink the datacenter. One Solace message router can replace the work being done by 10-30 servers running software-based messaging middleware, while using the power equivalent to about 1.5 servers, a power savings of 85-95%. That’s just power, remember, and doesn’t even reflect other cost-efficiencies like a smaller datacenter footprint and reductions in software licenses, software maintenance, linux maintenance contracts, and the server hardware itself.

It’s a win for everybody: faster applications for the operations teams and lower costs for the pencil pushers. Software-based middleware can’t demonstrate these results, and in fact is one of the key drivers of the “server sprawl” problem because scaling a software-based solution means splitting the work across more cores, more machines, etc.

The server vendors will forever push replacement cycles with a 10-15% more efficient machine, but it seems pretty clear that the most effective green strategy is finding ways to decommission the server racks altogether.