What's wrong with this picture?

Every now and then, I get pulled into computer performance improvement projects. In a lot of places I've been to, some people try to solve performance issues by throwing hardware at the problem. Most of the time, this does not solve their original problem. Sometimes, it even makes things worse.

What I usually see is that computer systems are doing too many unnecessary things. They are bogged down by doing things that they are not supposed to be doing in the first place. When I get into this situation, I focus on unnecessary workload reduction. In most cases, reducing or removing unnecessary workload solves the problem.

So when I saw this, my first reaction was "Why?".

At Sun, we take a different approach. We use energy efficient servers and desktops. The result is that not only do we save power to run our computers, we also don't need as much power to cool the space.

Unnecessary power consumption reduction.