Tag Archive for 'energy star'

Dell Hybrid hiding its (Green) light under a bushel!

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on August 1, 2008
in hardware
. 2 Comments

Screenshot of Dell Hybrid taken from their site

I first heard about the new Dell Hybrid PC from Walter Higgins on Twitter.

My initial reaction was “Dell Hybrid”? Do they have petrol engines and electric motors? Why the Hybrid name? It isn’t immediately obvious from the Dell Hybrid page on Dell’s website.

They look nice, to be sure but what about the Green credentials they are touting?

I then received an email from Dell’s Renee Daulong and she explained:

The Hybrid is about 80 percent smaller than the typical desktop minitower, and uses up to 70 percent less energy. In addition to being extremely energy efficient and Energy Star 4.0 compliant, the Studio Hybrid’s unique packaging was designed to be environmentally responsible:

· Reduced packing materials 30 percent by weight.

· Packing materials are also 95 percent recyclable.

· Reduced printed documentation 75 percent by weight.

· System recycling kit is included.

The Studio Hybrid can personalized with a choice of seven optional, interchangeable external finishes or color sleeves, one of which is made from bamboo.

Some of that information I found subsequently on the Hybrid page if you click on the Design tab about half-way down.

It is superb to see manufacturers being more responsible in their latest PC models but come on Dell, a machine as Green as this should at the very least have a dedicated page highlighting its Green credentials.

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RackSpace’s customers ‘won’t pay a premium’ for Green products?

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on July 1, 2008
in Uncategorized and datacenter
. 1 Comment

Premium
Photo Credit ignescent_infidel

Jon Brodkin wrote a piece in ComputerWorld UK about a survey of RackSpace’s customers which seems to suggest that they ‘won’t pay a premium’ for Green products. John goes on to extrapolate that they:

found some results suggesting businesses are losing interest in green technology.

There are a number of problems with this assumption. First off you have to realise that Rackspace don’t do co-lo. Rackspace only do managed hosting. So, if I am an IT manager I can’t put my equipment, no matter how energy-efficient, in a RackSpace Data Center, I have to use their equipment. What is not clear from the piece John wrote is what was the ‘premium’ the RackSpace customers were being asked to pay.

Again, if I am an IT manager, I can choose to buy, for example Dell’s PowerEdge™ Energy Smart 2950 III (SV22952), which is cheaper but slightly less powerful than their standard PowerEdge™ 2950 (SV22951). Realistically, the only reason I am going to do this is if it is going to save me money.

As James said previously - the wrong people are paying the electricity bill in companies currently (no pun):

IT doesn’t pay for its electricity. No, seriously, go to your FM manager or IT manager and ask who pays to power your IT properties. The vast majority of IT systems get a free ride on electricity bills, which is one reason its taken so long to fully consider IT carbon costs.

When that changes (and it will) watch IT managers suddenly become extremely interested in the energy ratings of their servers.

Going back to the RackSpace survey, fundamentally I think Rackspace are taking the wrong approach. What they should be doing is increasing prices to their customers across the board to reflect their own increased energy bill - except for those customers who chose to be hosted on energy efficient servers. If RackSpace took that route, suddenly you’d see a an about-face in the number of their customers who are apparently losing interest in green technology!!!

[Disclosure: I am co-founder a director of Cork Internet eXchange (CIX) an energy efficient data center based in Cork, Ireland. CIX charges all customers separately for their electricity usage.]

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