Amsterdam – famous for having more servers than citizens – is cracking down on wasted power in datacenters with new regulations.

After all, as the saying goes, “regulation is the EU’s superpower”.

This time, the Dutch are mad about servers not having the right power settings.  Yes!  Really.  The government is dictating how your server control panel is supposed to look.

Industry giant Equinix sent a message to its Amsterdam clients outlining the new regulations:

Following the legislation passed in the Netherlands in June 2023, we would like to draw your attention to the following…

All customers with servers in data centers in the Netherlands must confirm that their servers are set in balanced or power saving mode.

There are also new regs around operating range and humidity.

Requiring a specific performance mode is a little bit silly.  If someone has put in a rack of servers to crunch data or train models, “power saving mode” is useless.  That cycles down energy usage when CPU is idle, and these systems are chugging 24×7.

However, there may be some savings to glean when app servers, web servers, business systems, etc. wax and wane during the day.

The sad part of this is that if you sent out an email to everyone and said “guys, can everyone check your power settings, because if we enabled balanced or power saving mode, we can help the planet,” everyone would be too busy.  Instead, humanity needs these ham-fisted approaches: comply or perish saith the government.

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raindog308

Dread Lord of LowEnd Content at LowEndBox

I'm raindog308, techno polymath and long-time LowEndTalk community Administrator. My technical interests include all things Unix, perl, python, golang, shell scripting, vintage operating systems such as MVS, and relational database systems such as Oracle, PostgreSQL, and MySQL.

I also enjoy using LEBs! I have an empire of little guys for VPNs, larger guys for apps, and big guys for databases and storage. When I'm not in front a screen I'm into German Shepherd dogs, quality knives, target shooting, theology, tabletop roleplaying games, and forest hiking.

I enjoy writing technical articles here on LowEndBox to help people get more out of their systems. You can find me on LowEndTalk @raindog308

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