U.S. servers slurp more power than Mississippi

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Servers definitely suck a lot of power

If you've been installing servers in datacenters, then you have been connecting servers with 2, 3 and 4 power supplies. This has been normal in midrange servers for a while (HP 9000, Sun Enterprise, etc.) but now x86 servers are doing the same and have been for the last several years. This is huge in power usage and in cooling requirements.

And Leria is right, they need to be more power efficient and aware. Intel and AMD are going in the right direction with more power aware and efficient designs and with virtualization. If we can do more with less power and use the spare cycles more effectively by running multiple VMs on each piece of silicon, then we get more bang for the buck and for the kilowatt hour.

We now have to use both the carrot and the stick. The carrot is lower costs for the same work completed. The stick will have to be a premium for higher power usage. Not sure how we set the range or prices but an increasing/sliding scale for higher usage makes sense to me off the top of my head. Maybe also consider charging more to power the less power efficient servers. This adds to their cost and should help move customers to more efficient designs.

One more option is to use the grid model used by the SETI project. There are ways that companies can harness the unused cycles of workstations sitting idle during the evening. This would help offset the need for more server cycles at least during off hours. If companies can make these resources available to other companies then this is a profit center. Imagine companies in NY using spare cycles in Austrialia and Japan and vise versa. Your off hours cycles are my prime time cycles. We'd need a way to quantify our available CPU resources and make them available and then bill for their usage. It would still be cheaper than building out more datacenter space and could be done more dynamically if the utilities and tools are available.

It will be interesting to see where we are in another 5-7 years regarding power usage and techniques to minimize said issue.

Just my 2 cents.

Posted by: gigglypuff   Posted on: 02/15/07 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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