Jason’s blog thingy

A friend of mine is building a greenish website (I’ll link when it built) and mentioned the need for ‘carbon neutral’ website hosting. This is something I’ve been wanting to do for a long time and I think there are lot things coming together soon that will help.

My desire for ‘green’ hosting comes from purely selfish needs. My server rack at home draws a constant 700W of power and costs me about $A350 a quarter. Very expensive for a hobby. I thought, a typical home solar power system could easily handle that load. The only thing stopping me, of course is the setup cost.

Efficiency!
Of course it would be great if you could get server grade power efficient components… At the moment, if I setup a solar system and hooked it to my rack the power would go through theses stages:

solar panel (dc) > battery > inverter (ac) > ups (dc) > ups battery > ups inverter (ac) > computer switch mode power supply (dc) > computer switch mode power supply (ac) > computer switch mode power supply (dc) > computer.

Every ac/dc (and especially dc/ac) step is rock and roll!  loses power. My setup is a little unusual in that my UPS actually do convert every bit of power to DC before inverting it back up to AC – very good for protecting your server, very bad efficiency.

The first thing you would want to try is get the solar to go straight to the UPS battery. That would be ace, but its tricky because the UPS (which has a sort of little computer controller in it) expects to be the battery charger, expects a particular type of battery, switches things on and off according to when _it_ thinks the batteries will run out. So we can’t just plug the solar system straight into the UPS internals, but there may be a way to trick it… When I’ve got more time.

Alternatively, you could add to a solar setup and make _it_ a UPS. You would need automatic failover to mains power if the batteries get too low and computer interface to detect if that was going to happen and there was no mains power, so your servers could gracefully shutdown.
The other place that can be looked at is the computer power supply. Its possible now to have servers in data centers that run from 380 volts dc, which eliminates the first step inside the computer power supply. Unfortunately this is still pretty new technology, mostly in the testing stage and not available to me.

Finally, google recently proposed that computer industry manufacturers standardise on 12V dc power for all computer computer components. That means instead of a computer power supply having half a dozen different voltages it has only 12 volts and its up to the parts manufacturers to create any other voltages they need. If this was a reality it would make the power stages to my rack look like this instead:

solar panel > battery > computer

Thats much better! Of course this situation doesn’t exist. There is a fairly close option though – 12v DC  computer power supplies. Having never really investigated, I thought these only existed in low power ranges for mini-ITX computers, but powerstream has a 12v 500w unit and they also have 24 and 48 volt power supplies as well.

Best get back to work so I can earn all the money for this expensive hobby of mine