A greener idea...

[cjdelphi]

I'm always thinking of new ideas to save the environment...

Why not dump windows and linux servers and replace them which run on ARM processors,.. be something as simple as a $20 arduino kit with ethernet shield for small simple tasks like a whois server or a telnet server or even irc....

using dual core 1.4g ARM cpu's if you need something with a bit more power to deliver webpages and or servers, the beauty of doing this would be amazing, you could have server rooms running from 5v, which could be all easily powered by a few roof sized solar panels along with a wind turbine mounted, you could have a very very cheap and sustainable server room, along with a bank of batteries to store charge, no inverter would be needed and excess energy can be pumped back..., the heat generated by the server rooms could be pumped around the other rooms to keep them warm and cool water could be used to cool the hardware down if even required..

edison would be proud of me, bring back low voltage dc

 

[MattyMatt]

I am a fan of your idea, and for many applications it would work, probably fairly well.

That stated, it will still be a while before hardware could keep up with the demands of a lot of the applications now, considering more and more people / developers / companies are moving their operation to the cloud. As far as raw computational power goes and resources go, they would be a good move for places hosting low traffic websites/services. They are as you said, very low power, and can be run from battery banks very easily, which in my book is a huge plus.

The moment you start to push the demand up, is when it will start running into bottlenecks. limitations on the Ethernet shield, limitations on memory and limitations of available hosted services (ASP.NET,PHP etc.). Now, I am sure someone will come out or has already (I'm slightly behind on my reading) come out with HTML5 library capable of being served on an arduino, that would solve a lot of small and pesky problems.

All in all, I think your idea would be well served to the enthusiast, however, I wouldn't necessarily picture a server room full of batteries and arduinos.... Yet! Believe me, as far as I can tell, we will eventually get to that level for a lot of stuff but for most applications, there are just too many bottlenecks at this point.