Linux captures the 'green' flag, beats Windows 2008

[Dark Star]

Ensuring your servers stamp as small a carbon footprint as possible on the earth and in your data center can encompass everything from making sure they are shipped in recyclable packaging to hiring an analyst who can predict the total life-cycle environmental impact.

For this test, we examined power consumption as a way to judge whether Windows Server 2008 or Linux is, in fact, the 'greener' operating system. As the price of power hits record heights, power reduction mechanisms shipping within an operating system should play a key role in you energy conservation plan.

Our tests point to Linux as the winner of the green flag by margins that topped out at 12%. But we must note that our results are full of stipulations imposed by our test bed, and as the more truthful car advertisements might warn -- your wattage may vary.

We ran multiple power consumption tests using Windows Server 2008 Enterprise Edition, Red Hat's Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5.1 and SUSE Enterprise Linux 10 SP1 on four, popular 1U server machines, one each from Dell and IBM and two from HP. The results showed that while Windows Server 2008 drew slightly less power in a few test cases when it had its maximum power saving settings turned on, it was RHEL that did the best job of keeping the power draw in check across the board.

Source : Linux captures the 'green' flag, beats Windows 2008 power-saving measures - Network World

[praka123]

LOL! great going!

[vaithy]

Had they used the slackware or debian sid this results may be far better than RHEL,thanks for the information

[chandru.in]

@vaithy

I'm a big (really big) fan of Slackware. But though it is as stable (or may be more) as RHEL, a corporate cannot trust a purely community supported distro to run 50 of its servers, with 20 of them hosting mission critical apps. So RHEL is the obvious choice for corporates and that is where most energy hogging servers are run.

[MetalheadGautham]

Wow, congratulations to RHEL team members.

And yes, Debian and Slackware DO have lots of built in features to reduce load and hence processing, as they are age old mature systems. But industries can't use them as servers because commercial support is quite lacking for them, unless they hire paid customer support, which might not be good enough. They are more for use by those who know what they are doing. For example, most web hosting companies run Slackware or Debian, and the same are used by 90% of linux based websites or websites of software like VLC Media Player.

[nach]

Intresting huh