Ensuring your servers stamp as small a carbon footprint as possible on the earth and in your datacenter can encompass everything from making sure they are shipped in recyclable packaging to hiring an analyst who can predict the total lifecycle 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 percent. 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.
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For example, won't Exchange be communicating with a DC for it's configuration data? Plus, nearly everything in Exchange is presented via IIS - so it's then a mail server and a web server.
Not saying that this is the reason, but I'd be interested if there was a difference in the results if the Windows box was running Sendmail instead.
"When running in the high-performance mode in the active test, ... Windows Server 2008 had the best power consumption rating on the HP DL-160G5 server, spending on average about 6.5 watts less than Linux. "
"The HP DL-160 didn't show dramatic behavior changes in settings in the quiescent tests, and made Windows 2008 Server a winner in the active, performance-modes test where it seemed to give its best performance."
"...when Windows Server 2008 was running in power-savings mode on the Dell server, where it drew on average 3 percent less power [than Linux]."
IMHO I don't think this test really proves anything. In more of the scenarios the RHEL server did slightly better than Windows Server 2008 and SLES - yet in other (abeit less) scenarios the Windows box did better. As it always has been - the conclusion is that it depends on what you want the box to do, the load the box will be under and what hardware you are using.
So the same as before - chose the right hardware, OS and apps depending on the job..... <sigh>
a red deamon?.
;-)
Ah... I'm used to the servers I've maintained running 24/7 so the CPU/HDD would be constantly running anyway.
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