Strategies for Green IT at Penn - Spring 2008

Meeting Minutes (Chatroom discussion)
April 23, 2008

Updates

We began by reviewing the contributions to the wiki from the previous week. Clay Wells had created articles on SpeedStep options as well Energy Star Information.

Discussions

Bob reviewed the areas of focus that we had identified for grouping our documentation and reiterated the request to have as much documentation completed as possible by 5/16/2008. We will make everything available on a static webpage at the end of the evaluation, with the possibility of producing a printed booklet for BAs.

We reviewed the deliverables from the previous week and received status updates from the various team members. Stephanie talked about the difficulties of obtaining electrical monitoring equipment, but is still pursuing that goal. We may recommend that working with the data center staff may be a better way to go about getting electrical use information.

Based on the work we have so far, it is looking like we will need to make some general recommendations rather than getting too specific. Bob presented some of his findings from the previous week regarding Penn’s electrical cost per kWh and the cost of hosting a single VM with TSS’s VMWare ESX server. Bob also suggested that we may want to shy away from encouraging machine life cycle extension at this point because of advances in efficiencies with newer machines.

Deliverables:

• Bob Desilets:
  • End of Life
  • System Requirements (Virtual Machines)
  • Contact other team members to contribute to the research efforts
• Don Valentino:
  • Information on the racking and cabling
• Clay Wells:
  • OS optimization (continuing)
• Stephanie Alarcon:
  • Monitoring/metering
  • Vendor Offerings
    

Final Notes

Next week (4/30/2008) we will meet in conjunction with the Desktop / End User team to go over the status updates.