On 31/03/16 02:55, Katherine Maher wrote: > IIRC, we included clean energy consumption as a factor in > evaluating in our RFC for our choice of a backup colo a few years back
Since I strongly support emissions reduction, on my own initiative I did an analysis of expected CO2 emissions of each of the candidate facilities during the selection process of the backup colo. That's presumably what you're referring to. <https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1adt45Msw2o8Ml0s8S0USm9QLkW9ER3xCPkU9d2NJS4Y/edit#gid=0> My conclusion was that codfw (the winner) was one of the worst candidates for CO2 emissions. However, the price they were offering was so much lower than the other candidates that I could not make a rational case for removing it as an option. You could buy high-quality offsets for our total emissions for much less than the price difference. However, this observation does require us to actually purchase said offsets, if codfw is to be represented as an ethical choice, and that was never done. codfw would not tell us their PUE, apparently because it was a near-empty facility and so it would have technically been a very large number. I thought it would be fair to account for marginal emissions assuming a projected higher occupancy rate and entered 2.9 for them, following a publication which gave that figure as an industry average. It's a new facility, but it's not likely that they achieved an industry-leading PUE since the climate in Dallas is not suitable for evaporative cooling or "free" cooling. > Ops runs a tight ship, and we're a relatively small footprint in our colos, > so we don't necessarily have the ability to drive purchasing decisions > based on scale alone. I think it's stretching the metaphor to call ops a "tight ship". We could switch off spare servers in codfw for a substantial power saving, in exchange for a ~10 minute penalty in failover time. But it would probably cost a week or two of engineer time to set up suitable automation for failover and periodic updates. Or we could have avoided a hot spare colo altogether, with smarter disaster recovery plans, as I argued at the time. My idea wasn't popular: Leslie Carr said she would not want to work for an organisation that adopted the relaxed DR restoration time targets that I advocated. And of course DR improvements were touted many times as an effective use of donor funds. Certainly you have a point about scale. Server hardware has extremely rudimentary power management -- for example when I checked a couple of years ago, none of our servers supported suspend-to-RAM, and idle power usage hardly differed from power usage at typical load. So the only option for reducing power usage of temporarily unused servers is powering off, and powering back on via out-of-band management. WMF presumably has little influence with motherboard suppliers. But we could at least include power management and efficiency as consideratons when we evaluate new hardware purchases. > At the time the report came out, we started talking to Lukas about how we > could improve our efforts at the WMF and across the movement, but we've had > limited bandwidth to move this forward in the Foundation (and some > transitions in our Finance and Operations leadership, who were acting as > executive sponsors). However, I think it's safe to say that we'd like to > continue to reduce our environmental impact, and look forward to the > findings of this effort. We could at least offset our datacentre power usage, that would be cheap and effective. -- Tim Starling _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
