Green Options

2008 was a banner year for sustainablog, and we want to end it as strongly as we started.  So, for the next twelve days, I’ll take a look back at some of the best and most memorable posts from the past year.

Let me start off, though, by expressing my immense gratitude to all of the writers who contributed during 2008. This was our first full year as a multi-author blog, and I couldn’t have been more pleased with the way it turned out. Some of the writers I’ll mention have moved on; others on coming on board. I’m grateful for the inspiration you’ve all brought to the blog over the past year, and look forward with anticipation to what the new year brings us.

January 2008

Like New Year’s fireworks, January started off with a bang.  Here are a few great posts to remember:

• Jason Phillip’s post on Chicago’s bottled water tax was one of our most popular ever… it’s still getting pageviews!
• Maria Surma Manka wrote a very thorough (and also very popular) review of Scientific American’s “Solar Grand Plan.”
• I took a look at an innovative South African whose developed a low-cost, high-yield method of generating energy from chicken poop.

At the end of the 1970s, the world saw a computer revolution, and waves of new business development followed. By the early 1990s, there were signs of a green computing revolution, and now businesses are taking advantage of the industry’s need for environmentally-friendly products. Data centers, in particular, have become a target market, since the past few years have seen a sharp increase in their rate of energy consumption.

One of the more successful technologies to have been developed is virtualization. Broadly speaking, to virtualize is to make a single piece of hardware function as multiple pieces. Different user interfaces isolate portions of the hardware, and make each one operate as a separate entity. As applied to data centers, installing virtual infrastructure allows more operating systems and applications to run on fewer servers, which reduces overall energy use and cooling requirements. Running fewer servers also means that data centers could reduce their building size as well.