The current uptake in high performance computing means mostly good things, but it also comes with a few built-in challenges. The paradox of this particular progress is this: when you scale hardware, you oftentimes scale power consumption, right along with it. My colleague, Shesha Krishnapura, a senior principal engineer from Intel IT Core Systems Engineering group, has some good news to share, in this podcast speaking with

 The Register’s ]]>

Tim Phillips. Shesha says that “In the past, that power relationship has existed. But with Intel’s core microarchitecture based platform, the power envelop has remained constant while performance has climbed significantly.”

Check out Shesha’s podcast below.

I'd like to introduce myself--my name is Ilene Aginsky and I'm the new site community manager for the IT@Intel zone on Open Port, Intel's online IT community site. I started out in IT about two years ago and got very interested in the green aspect of IT.

We have had quite a few discussions out here in the community on green versus efficient Greening Data Centers or Make 'em Efficient? and I'm not as concerned by what it is called but rather what we must do to ensure we don't damage the environment.

The issues are not simple and require a balancing act. It is important to look at the picture holistically, from cradle to grave. For example, Intel IT will be refreshing approximately 20,000 servers this year with new servers that will consume less energy and reduce our carbon footprint. This begs the question: what happens to the old equipment and what are we doing to prevent it from ending up in a landfill?

I asked my colleague Robert who is the Secure Data Control Program Manager for IT and he told me that all end-of-life (EOL) servers at Intel follow the same process. We make sure that we secure all the data by removing and sanitizing the hard drives.

Once the data has been sanitized there are three possible paths:

Resale - we prioritize re-sale

Donations - some organizations need servers, even without disks

Scrap - anything deemed worthless to resale or donations is sent to scrap vendors for material reuse and recycling

What does your organization do with old equipment?