BANGALORE, INDIA: Presenting the top five trends in open source in the Infrastructure space by Satish Mohan, head engineering centre, Red Hat India.

Go Green Initiative

* Save energy consumption and reduce costs
* Focus on energy efficient hardware equipments like servers, SAN, UPS, switch et al
* Focus on building Green Datacenters

The environment and green issues have become pervasive across all facets of life. Everyone is keen to ‘go green’ whether it’s cutting down on water usage, recycling, driving a hybrid car or any number of other initiatives. It’s no different at Red Hat, where we are working hard to deliver greener products and solutions. A recent Network World test examining power consumption to determine the ‘greener’ operating system validates Red Hat’s efforts to move toward green computing.

Network World ran multiple power consumption tests using Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.1, SUSE Enterprise Linux 10 SP1 and Windows Server 2008 Enterprise Edition on servers from Dell, IBM and HP. Red Hat Enterprise Linux ranked at the top in keeping the power draw in check, pulling as much as 12 percent less power than Windows 2008 on identical hardware. This reduced power draw was evident across testing in both performance and power saving modes and transcended all server models used in the test bed.

Red Hat is significantly involved in the development of projects that are focused on saving power. We’re a contributing member to www.LessWatts.org, an Intel-sponsored project bringing together developers, users and sysadmins all in the effort to create a community around saving power on Linux. One of several interesting projects that are part of the LessWatts program is PowerTOP, a Linux tool that helps identify programs that are power-hungry while a system is idle. It allows us to measure the power use by individual applications and then optimize those that have poor power footprints.

Our efforts around cloud computing also hold a place in making datacenters more environmentally friendly. Companies don’t have to host their own machines when they need extra compute space, eliminating the need to have the extra energy and materials on hand that could lead to environmental waste. In addition, Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Fedora have less hardware requirements, making it possible for people around the world to use legacy hardware while still getting the same functionality.

We continue to make green computing a company-wide effort and continuously examine power management features that can be implemented in Red Hat Enterprise Linux. As the saying goes, “it ain’t easy being green.” But at Red Hat, we’re putting our best foot forward in an effort to reduce our carbon footprint on the earth.

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