Green Computing Articles, Computer Power Usage: Do eco-friendly computing and business growth go hand in hand? Now they do. According to Gartner Group, 80 percent of the world's data centers are constrained by heat, space, and power requirements. David Yen, Sun's executive vice president of Sun's Scalable Systems Group, shares with Boardroom Minutes readers how sustainable computing can boost your bottom line while simultaneously doing a favor for the planet. Read this green computing article to learn more about green computing and computer power usage.

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Do eco-friendly computing and business growth go hand in hand? Now they do. According to Gartner Group, 80 percent of the world's data centers are constrained by heat, space, and power requirements. David Yen, Sun's executive vice president of Sun's Scalable Systems Group, shares with Boardroom Minutes readers how sustainable computing can boost your bottom line while simultaneously doing a favor for the planet.

Q: What are the realities of today's data center?

A: In addition to the demand on processing capability to satisfy the growth of the business, there is enormous demand on power consumption and space requirements for computing platforms. Data center configurations are no longer one-dimensional — meaning that factors other than performance or affordability must be considered. The equation is much more complicated — now companies must worry about their envelope of power consumption as well as the demand of physical space. These factors all work together to form a multidimensional equation.

Q: What is meant by green computing and what is Sun's play here?

A: Green computing is a mindset. Today's modern network economics have more and more businesses requiring high computing capability whether it be for searches, Web services, e-commerce, traffic control, or supply chain management. The bottom line is that they all require computing with significant capacity.

Up until now, we have approached the problem by pushing the physical technology of the CPU frequency — namely, the number of cycles that a piece of silicon can do. But you quickly run into the law of physics that says that when you force the transistors to switch as quickly as possible, there is a corresponding amount of power consumption and the heat generated by the transistors grows proportionally.

Considering that networking has a quadratic effect, the interaction grows geometrically rather than linearly. The industry has reached a point where it has driven power consumption of these increments to a point that it deviates from what the customer can utilize.

So green computing is a mindset that asks how we can satisfy the growing demand for network computing without putting such pressure on the environment. There is an alternative way to design a processor and a system such that we don't increase demands on the environment, but still provide an increased amount of processing capability to customers to satisfy their business needs. Green computing is not about going out and designing biodegradable packaging for products.

Q: What responsibility do corporations have to promote and practice sustainable computing?