My wife was reading the science journal of UCSB (where she did her Masters degree) and pointed out an article referring to the fact that “a typical server consumes as much energy in a year as an SUV”. She then asked how many servers we have….
I found this a bit dismaying at first, as we try to engage in sustainable actions both personally (we have solar panels, two Prius cars, our own chickens – the typical urban hippie) and LogicMonitor as a corporate entity (we recycle, encourage non-car transport, etc). I didn’t like to think that our servers were undoing all the other environmental actions we were taking.
But on reflection, I realized that LogicMonitor is an environmental net positive. Our servers are not only fairly energy efficient (using SSDs, which use about half the energy of rotational disks), but they are very heavily leveraged. Each of our servers is collectively replacing about 100 individual servers that our customers would have deployed if they ran their own monitoring servers. (More, if they ran redundant monitoring servers like we do.)
So from that point of view, LogicMonitor is taking hundreds of SUV’s off the road. All while freeing them from having to run, patch, and backup those servers, or extend their software to deal with new things like MongoDB monitoring, and so on – we do all that for them. So that means they can get out of the office earlier, and avoid the peak traffic times – saving more driving impact. Unless they have something else to do at work. 🙂
Happy thanksgiving.