How To Make Your Office IT/Computer Hardware More Green

As part of doing my part for the environment I consolidated a lot of other server/computer hardware in my office into a low-power, quiet and cool running Dedicated AMD Opteron Desktop Workstation Server from scratch.  It has kept my office cooler and quieter, all while saving on power and more importantly the environment.  I should have added that I also reduced the number of hard disks from several if not dozens in my office, to just 6 disks (all of them larger I believe 4-8TB each).

But I wanted to take it a step further and I admit I was also motivated each morning by the unfriendly smells of burning PCB no matter what I did.  It’s an exercise in efficiency, savings, environment and your own health and sanity.

In my office I have a gigabit 24-port rack mount switch and 42U server rack where I store parts and other items for testing and development.  Believe it or not but this switch seems to have made an incredible amount of heat and even worse, the burning PCB smell which can’t be healthy and it still baffles me because its fan is working just fine and the unit doesn’t get that hot.

This is where the waste part came in, the thing is that under my Desk I have a small gigabit switch for all of my other devices such as VOIP, phone, printer, laptop, etc… and the 24-port switch only has 4 or 5 ports active.  I’ve kept the 24-port on the rack and ready to plug in and I just switched in a humble but efficient 5-port gigabit switch which has reduced heat and the bad PCB smell in the office.

One thing I admit that I have done (or rather haven’t) is enabled any kind of sleep mode for my Desktop workstation and this is because it is nearly always active and I like to remotely connect to it at odd times of the day.  But still this current Opteron workstation runs cooler than my previous labyrinth of servers and workstations that were active so I can actually hear again.  By consolidating most services into a single unit with virtual servers you can often eliminate the majority of power usage which primarily comes from hot and power hungry CPUs.  This is one reason why I haven’t upgraded to newer Opteron architecture, yes you get more cores per CPU but the power usage ends up being more than what I am into now and is no more efficient and far exceeds my current needs.

Areeb Soo Yasir

Business and technology have always gone hand in hand for me, and now I've built nearly 20 years of expertise. A few notable achievements: -> Tier III-Designed & deployed multiple mission critical datacenter environments in Canada, US, Hong Kong, Singapore & China. -> Software Engineering: Created a Linux OS from scratch, including a custom kernel to maintain millions of dollars in client infrastructure, deploy and report as needed. Created the “Windows Geeks” and “Password Pros” Windows Password Reset software recommended by Microsoft. -> Business Negotiations: Conducted intensive negotiations with branches of the Peoples Republic of China and the various state-run Telecom operations including China Telecom and China Unicom for access to their trillion dollar backbone infrastructure. We were the first western company to have such network access where other IT companies such as Vodafone and Google failed. -> Cloud Infrastructure Creation: Created the first proprietary “Clustered Cloud Architecture” that rivals competing Google, IBM, Microsoft & Alibaba alternatives. I'd love to chat #IT or #Linux or even #Business, so don't hesitate to connect. Cheers!

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