Shine a light: how HP wants to get a lot greener
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Hardware, Server, HP on
Every three seconds, HP sells a printer (two of them in Europe). That makes HP responsible for a lot of the 22 pages office workers print every day, half of which end up in the bin. All that paper and ink can make it hard to think of HP as particularly green, especially when Vyomesh Yoshi, the VP of the print and imaging division, talks about wanting to see more pages on HP printers.
Naturally enough, he doesn’t think it’s what much of a contradiction. “We are in the printing business; we don’t want customers to not print. We have to make sure they use it, but also make sure they use it effectively. We want to make sure every printer they buy from HP has lower energy consumption than any other printer. ” Make sure printers turn on “instantly” and people will be happier to turn them off; use the WebJet admin software to turn printers off at the weekend and you’ll save even more energy. “Make duplex printing the default and you can save a tremendous amount,” he says.
And if you think we throw away a lot of paper in offices, 20% of newspapers are discarded, as are 40% of books and 20-30% of marketing bumph. People print too many copies that go out of date, because of the setup charges on offset printing. Naturally again, HP has a solution; customised on-demand printing for everything from wine labels to out of print books.
HP is also pushing green ideas for the data centre like running the air conditioning four degrees higher by blowing cold air directly into the blades. The air coming out the back of the blades is a lot hotter - more like a sauna - but heat behind the blade doesn’t matter so much. But if CEO Mark Hurd is right to predict that data centres will use 50% less energy soon, it’s going to take more than hot air.
The reason smart cooling works is that HP puts sensors on each rack to make sure the air is only as cold as it needs to be. Without those, says HP fellow Chandrakant Patel , a home air conditioning system is more sophisticated what’s in most data centres. The next step is to use optical interconnects and lasers to replace copper data cables - which saves the 20% of your energy that’s heating and cooling the copper. More likely now HP Labs has come up with a photodetector so sensitive it works as a solar cell.
But the carbon footprint of a data centre includes the CO2 from the concrete used to build it, and the manufacturing and transportation of everything from the blades to the carpets. Really reducing that means calculating it and Patel is working on a framework to cover technology in general. That would measure the true energy cost, down to what it takes to deal with the fertilizer runoff from the fields growing the corn that’s made into the ethanol that goes into the biodiesel that drives the backup generator. It’s a huge undertaking, but it strikes me as more likely to help than maintaining that video conferencing can solve the problem by taking cars off the roads (hint: maybe not if that means more data centres to run the video conferencing).
Rated: 60% (3 votes)
Loading ...Comment by www.magazinearena.com - April 24, 2008 on 8:32 am
what is the next step of HP
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