Slashdot Mirror
Why Don't Servers Support Power Management?
Cerlyn asks: "I am the network administrator of three server grade machines purchased from three separate companies. The recent power problems in California reminded me of the fact that none of these servers seem to support power management. The operating systems these systems run (Linux 2.2, 2.4, and FreeBSD 4.2) are compiled to support power management, but do not detect any power management capabilities at all. Granted, no one wants a server sleeping on the job. But the way things seem to be coded, processors can not even sleep while idle without known hardware support. Lightly loaded machines are often idle 75% of the time or more. Sleeping while idle could make them save a significant amount of power. For many companies, the extra ten seconds it would take to spin up a backup server's hard drive(s) likely would be a non-issue. So, why don't server grade computers support advanced power management (APM), APCI and the like?" And in the land of the rolling blackout, one has to wonder if the potential power saved could help the situation, assuming a good percentage of the big iron in Silicon Valley were configured to conserve what power it could (as opposed to adding on to the drain as it is now).
If people really want to save power on their machines just switch off the monitor. These things use about 200W even with what laughably gets called screensavers these days. I find it incredible the amount of power wasted in offices when monitorsa are left on overnight or over the w/e for no reason other than some people are just too damn lazy to press the power off switch.
First of all, you seem to be only talking about the drives, which have to spin up. There is no cost or wear and practically no latency involved with changing the processor mode. Second, many servers sit idle at night. If you were to spin down the drives after 30 minutes idle, they would only cycle on and off once a day. And if you are worried about a drive failing on power up, that's what RAID is for. As for the UPS argument, adding 10 seconds to the shutdown sequence (for a sleeping drive to spin up) should be a non-issue unless you purchased the wrong size UPS.
How many times have you driven by your work at night and noticed every light in every building on, even though probably less than 10% are being used? Or the lights in a lab? Or the lights in a server room? Even during the day, there are too many lights on. The point is that there are better ways to conserve than to make a server slower and less reliable.
A led panel can be run of less than a Watt.. Yoru subwoofer won't be using any power if there is no volume running through it. Because the woofer is sitting at zero state 0V, it won't use any power as the diference between 0V and GND is 0. Your refridgerator will use power, that is a given. Your DSL modem will use virtually no power, by far less than a kW. Your computer most likley has a 200 to 300W power supply. When your system is in sleep mode that power supply may be creating voltage, but it isn't creating current. It will not always use '300W' it will use what the system pulls from it. Granted there is a little overhead, no clue how much but if it takes %10 overhead to run the powersupply that is 30W.. .03kW/h. And I doubt its that high. On top of that your power supply will only take 5-10W of 3.3V when your system is off (as oposed to being in standby mode) Your processor takes roughly 30W, far less when idle. Memory takes 15mA wich equates to .0495W.. etc etc.. Your TV in standby mode takes mA of current to operate. Without the TV acually being on it takes minimal current. a DVD/VHS player is the same story.
When idle your equipment takes a very minimal amount of power. Its power up/down times that are so critical. My harddrive takes 10W of power to startup, but takes 1W during heavy activity. (WD172AA) I am sure this is much worse for 7200 or 10k RPM drives. to worry about your alarm clock is just stupid. It will take virtually no current since there is no major driving force within. a LED is a low current/power device.
This is a classic example of a "generated shortage." There's enough power in California, but almost 10,000 MW of generation is "offline for maintenance." And has been for a year. The morons in California's legislature are the ones who precipitated this problem by thinking they could out-smart the free market system and just half-deregulate.
Tell me, what is the financial incentive for a power generation company in California to put those plants back on-line? To drop the wholesale cost of energy 10-fold? Yeah, right.
Don't assume that not building new plants is the problem. Two years ago we were using almost 40,000 MW an hour during the peak period of the day, and we didn't have even a stage-1 emergency. Now we're pushing 30,000MW and they're crying scared and blacking out those poor bastards in Northern California.
Oh, and did you know those "bankrupt" utilities that they're going to make YOU pay to bail out are really not all that poor? They had to pay all their money to the generators. Funny thing is that their parent company is the one operating the generators.
Geez, I guess that was kinda off topic. Rant over.
At the moment we get our power from two sources - the UK National Grid and our onsite gas-fired power plant (also supplies hot water - "combined heat and power"). The power plant is already operating at maximum capacity during peak periods of demand, so we have to buy in power from the Grid. The problem is that the cables are nearing capacity, so if we want to increase the amount of power coming in from the Grid we will have to lay a new cable. This will cost at least three million pounds (five million US dollars).
Part of the proposed solution is to replace CRTs with flat panels. This will cost us a fair bit in capital terms, but:
Etienne Pollard
Imperial College Union
Aren't they supposed to be running ALL THE TIME so as to serve many users with many deamons and programs IMMEDIATELY and ALL THE TIME?
Of course Power Management should be available for workstations, and even more so, for laptops, but how are you going to serve effectively, and respond immediately, if your server is always trying to go to sleep?
Actually, the person you're supporting was being sarcastic.
co2 is harmless
CO2 isn't *poisonous*. The thing is, if that's your definition of "harmless", then water is "harmless", too. Its just that it can take the place of the air that you're breathing, and cause you to drown. Which is exactly why CO2 *can* kill you -- if you flood a room with it, you have no O2 left, and you die.
Plus, besides CO2, most US power comes from coal power plants, and despite modern anti-pollution efforts, SO2 is given off (hmm...I *think* it's sulfur dioxide...sulfur something or other), which causes all sorts of fun things like acid rain, degradation of marble, smog, etc. Whee.
I'm not much of an environmentalist, but I *did* live in West Virginia for a while (primary source for US coal...IIRC, over 70%...maybe more now that nuclear power has fallen way out of favor), and the mining that goes on to produce the coal being burnt in the power plants does a real number on the environment, too.
infact plants NEED
True. And they evolved so that they got all they needed from existing sources on Earth (otherwise, they wouldn't have lived very long).
C)2 you are thinking CO1 or more comonly carbon Monoxyide (mono=one=1 di=two=2) hence he is completely correct in stating that we could produce as much carbon dioxide(CO2) as we want infact everytime you exhale YOU create CO2
Actually, no. Being in a room where a given volume of CO is inserted is more dangerous than a given volume of CO2, yes. But do you know *why*? The CO bonds with the O2 in the air, producing CO2, and reducing the proportion of O2 in the air. Just like CO2 does (by "squeezing out" O2), but to a greater degree.
- A.P.
--
* CmdrTaco is an idiot.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
cat /etc/powerd.conf on your nearest solaris box
FreeBSD doesn't HLT on a SMP system, because they have not yet solved the problem of waking up the HLTed CPU in all cases. On a single processor system HLT is called.
For those who want to save power on a server, turn the monitor off when you leave the console. There isn't ,much more that you can do.
You could try and get everyone to suddenly decide to put solar panels on their rooves and start conserving electricity. Not bloody likely to those newly rich Internet millionaires who just bought their first $5 million home with completely automated toilet flushing facilities and 10000 watt lighting in the backyard so they can play nerf gun wars in the middle of the night.
Anyway, as others have pointed out, spinning down drives in ANY machine is a BAD idea. You're just putting more wear-and-tear on the system causing it to fail sooner. That may be fine for your $1k PC with the $100 ATA hard drive in it but when you're spinning down $50k worth of disks every once in awhile you're going to kill their MTBF rate! If your community cannot provide adequate power needs for your businesses you should leave and move it to somewhere that does. Come to the midwest for example. We'd be happy to build as many nuclear power plants as you need to get some of those fat tech jobs and money.
A hard drive is between 10W and 20W.
A motherboard/CPU is maybe 80W.
A light bulb is 100W
A television is 300W
A washing machine is 500W
A vacuum cleaner is 1500W
A hot air clothes dryer is 2000W
A cold air conditioner is 2500W
A hot water heater is 4000W
So what's my point? Leaving a light bulb on overnight is far more wasteful. Watching TV for 2 hours is far more wasteful. Having a hot shower rather than a cold shower is more wasteful. Using an air conditioner rather than opening a window (or having a properly designed house) is far more wasteful.
Try saving power in the real world first, then start worrying about the piddling small amounts of power consumed by your 20W hard disk. Turn off some light bulbs, use energy saving globes, don't use the air conditioner, have a cold shower, go read a book rather than watch the 80cm TV, ride a bicycle rather than drive that car to the local supermarket. These are all REAL energy savings.
It's interesting to me that the building of power plants is opposed by some environmentalists in California. It would seem that you could more readily control the polution produced by a properly built, maintained, and regulated power plant than the thousands of diesel generators that get powered up when rolling blackouts are applied...
I'd say most businesses' accounting, print and file servers could be allowed to power down from closing time until opening the next day.
But, if you are in an office like mine, we have batch jobs that are constantly being run during that time frame. Sure, some departmental servers could be powered down, but it would be more effective to have everyone shutdown their desktops when they leave for the night (Of course the real solution to the CA problem is to build some new power plants, which they haven't done for a decade).
the good ground has been paved over by suicidal maniacs
- Microsoft covers all the bases, you people are stuck in the outfield.
Seeing as how no one is playing baseball right now, this analogy is ironically apt.The systems administration point of view says "servers do not sleep."
If it's an important server, you have it on a UPS. If you must have 24/7 uptime, your UPS might include a generator, or two.
All the technology in the world won't hide your lack of vision, talent, or understanding.
Intel needs lots of power for the hardware. Fab machinery and test equipment power usage is measured in kilowatts. Turning off the lights barely puts a dent in their total power usage.
See:
Energy Smart $39.95 at home depot.
Or, if you need a new refrigerator.
Sun Frost refrigerators
Dastardly
Oh well, I think a lot of servers are out there that might go power down, and noone did a bad job on setting them up. Just think of the lots of fileservers in 'normal' offices, that aren't used during nights and weekends.
These could save lots of power.
But it makes surely just sense if it can power down for time measured at least in half of hours.
Michael Bergbauer (michael.bergbauer@gmx.net)
We have about 50,000 sq ft and it's the raised floor cooling, AC, lights that suck current. We also have a ton of routers and switches and firewalls that can't power down. We have load balancing clusters that are always running.
In a commercial environment you can't get away with an SLA that says "we'll power down your servers at random which will create 30% greater latency".
But perhaps someone here could answer the question of: in the real world are the heating demands of spooling server in and out of an idle state worse or better than leaving it on?
You make some good points. Unfortunately it hasn't been my experience that customers would even be willing to pay less for power thrifty service. Even if they get 1 hit an hour they all seem convinced that the giant whale of all hits is comming and they have to be prepared for it.
The problem with load balancers is that if you've built them right they're always busy and every node in the clusted is always doing something, say @ 25-35% capacity. Else you've wasted your cluster dollars if you have a whole node doing nothing for a period of time.
The fan can run for weeks without any problems. But if I turn it off, let it cool down, and then try to turn it back on, it won't go. I have to keep WD-40 around for those times.
--
Why should a hard drive stop spinning? There's a great amount of inertia to overcome when it's stopped, plus a lot of static friction.
Seems to me that they HD should spin 15000rpm when it's in use, and operate on a sliding-scale when not in use: the longer unused, the slower it spins, down to perhaps 1000rpm.
But keeping it spinning: I should think that's important in achieving fast spin-up times and reducing the power demand during spin-up.
--
--
Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
The point is, you can turn off the load side of the UPS, but the rectifier/battery charger/inverter will still draw power. Granted it's less power, but it's still power, and now it's doing absolutly nothing. It's one-thing to pay the penalty for this overhead when the UPS is doing actual work, but it's another when it just sucking up juice.
check out HomePower Magazine for the best scoop on renewable, off-grid power. Even if you don't want to go off the grid, most of what they talk about is applicable to rolling your own disaster recovery systems...
I like your load balanced server idea... on large installations, you could have an authoritative server that's on always, and in a light traffic situation, tells, say, 7 of the other 9 to go to sleep, then wakes them up when when /. links..
Yup. That's part of it. Another part is thermal stress, which is one of the big killers for electromechanical systems.
They are made of different materials, which expand and contract at different rates as the heat and cool down. This causes microscopic flexing every time the device is power cycled. Some components, that have wide engineering margins, can handle lots of power cycles. Others can't. Which one do you have? Only one way to find out, and you don't want to...
My ML370 here does support some functions of ACPI. In 2000, it allows the monitors and hard drives to go to sleep, and also offers hybernate. No sleep options though.
Also, the fans are not just low and high, they do change speed based on temperature. Running the d.net client will increase the fan speed over time.
With tools like the Compaq remote insight boards, server managers could properly shut down and bring back servers when needed from any location in the world. Or a cheaper method would involve the Insight Manager program and WOL setup.
All clear, wail the sirens!
I prayed about it, and God said, "Don't do it!" But I thought, "I know better."
Well, the issue is, the APM specification does not cover multiple cpu systems.
As Alan Cox said, "If making that APM call reformats your disk and plays tetris on an SMP box the bios vendor is within spec (if a little peculiar). No APM call of any kind is SMP safe."
This is just like television, only you can see much further.
Not to mention that it's the time when the drive's current requirements are the greatest. These inrush spikes are not a big problem for a system with a drive or two but I've seen places with systems with large RAID arrays attached to servers where they popped breakers if the power came back on while the drive cabinets were sitting there with their power switches in the ON position. Apparently, not all setups allow you to or are configured to use the SCSI start command to sequence the drive's startups like they used to do in the days of yore. Happily, newer drives are not as power hungry (I can remember some old 5.25 inch disks that used 40+W of power) but now that these 15,000 RPM drives are coming out...
If you're trying to save power turning off the monitors when no one's actually sitting in front of them helps enormously. Where I used to work, whenever there was a power outage and we switched over to the UPS (no generator while I was there) standard procedure was to immediately turn off any monitors that no one was actively working on. Gave us well over another half hour or more of battery time. Switching to KVM boxes to handle, say, eight servers with a single monitor halped out a lot too.
--
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
First, I agree power management in a server makes sense. But not because of california legislations but because the most important server parameter is MTBF. Power management can increase the MTBF and efficiency of the cooling subsystem. This in turn increases MTBF of disks and the entire system. One degree away from the optimum operating temperature can decrease a disk's life by an year or more.
Also, you do not spin down disks on servers for both business and reliability reasons. The business reason is server latency. The reliability reason is that most server HDUs hate to be spun down and their MTBF decreases (which is again business in a sense). Also, the biggest power eaters in most modern servers are the cooling systems and the CPUs. Not the disks. Disks hardly go above 2-10W nowdays while a PIII with the fans can go up to a 100W. Alpha goes even beyond that. Also, spinning up and down disks to 7200-10000 RPM can actually generate more heat and consume more power than keeping them running.
Some bits of info by platform:
So overall the situation is that for one of the most popular platforms the power magement is hardly used due to the fact that the OS support just came in. For the second most popular platform (Sun) the power management was never there. The others are pretty much there as well.
And to conclude: I do not feel comfortable installing linux 2.4.0 or the ACPI support for BSD on real production machines yet.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
Another way to save imense amounts of power is to get rid of as much unused hardware as possible. Many servers have between one and many internal disks, expansion slots, cards, inputs and outputs that never get used; all of these take extra power. A 'thin server' on the other hand might have nothing more than a network and a serial terminal interface and truthfully you dont need anything more. I Have gone so far as to build a couple systems with nothing more than a bootable root CD (which doubles as a nice little security measure), that mounts everything else off either an NFS or Fibre-Channel disk array. These work great for every common task I have put them up to, mail, http, smb, ftp, nfs, etc... along with a terminal server you have all you need to even build an initial install and solve problems at the system console.
x86 servers are behind in this game as they dont support serial consoles at the BIOS level unless you are using an expansion card like a PCWeasel which is still in the several hundred dollar range.
If you really need graphical management capabilities get Exceed, or ReflectionX running for X-win support or PC Anywhere for those MS products. Once you get remote management up and running you will likely never walk into your server room again so you can also save power by killing the lights.
Not only do the servers consume kilowatts of power,
but require kilowats of air conditioning.
First, APM itself might not be a good idea for serious servers, but building (and configuring) servers with some consideration of power efficiency would be smart. The power use by server farms is a horrible expense. The cooling costs of server farms is horrible. But up to now it seems that getting a computer to work at all is the only point; how many watts it takes and how many BTUs it dumps is mostly ignored. Being Biggest and Baddest is used to sell, efficiency is not. I expect this will soon change...
Second, most servers are not on server farms. My basement server might be on a DSL connection that is faster than most leased lines of yore, but it is still IO-limited. So it works quite well for me to run a little hacked Think NIC box (www.thinknic.com): I added an otherwise missing hard disk and underclocked (!) the CPU, and the result takes very little power--it has to, the power supply on the thing is too small to draw much. I keep the CRT off when I am not using it. I also bought a little UPS--but the server takes so little power my backup time should be very good. Certainly I am a minimal case, but I suspect that many servers out there are over powered and misused.
Third, why don't computers and related equipment have small builtin UPSs? They already have DC power supplies, and DC is what is needed to charge most batteries. DC is what the computer actually needs, and DC is what batteries produce. Doing some battery backup inside each box would be pretty easy. How much battery does a little ethernet hub need? External UPSs need to make AC from DC (which is never terribly efficient) and they themselves become single points for potential failure. Sure, if you need a survivable facility, buy big UPSs and generators, but the failover and resistance to tripping over power cords would be so much better if each piece of equipment had a few minutes of backup built in. A well maintained generator should be able to start up and be running smoothly within just a few minutes. If the equipment itself could last a dozen minutes or so, there would be no need for any external UPSs other than for a few CRTs. As most power problems are very short, even home users would like a few minutes of backup time.
-kb, the Kent who thinks computers are in a brute-force '50s "muscle car" era and that there is a lot of room for a little design and deployment efficiency.
P.S. Don't forget that most so called "screen savers" are really just entertainments that don't save anything.
Not all servers are connected to the internet. Most company servers just sit there at night waiting for the employees to wake up... (apart from making backups, which may or may not take all night).
This is your sig. There are thousands more, but this one is yours.
And that's exacly why the USA is responisble for 25% percent of the CO2 production in the world.
This is your sig. There are thousands more, but this one is yours.
But lets say you need a box that needs to be on its own and has the ability(time) to spin down. I personally would not want this not because of the extra time for the spin up, but because the spin up is hard work on a motor and for a server - once that hard drive is spinning - keep it spinning. There is much less wear on the motor to keep it spinning than spinn up process. This should give a more predictable life to the drive.
Check out these distributed.net RC5-64 statistics.
:-)
Processor MHz Mkeys/sec
PowerPC G4 500 4.4
AMD Athlon 1000 3.4
Intel PIII 1000 2.8
Intel P4 1500 2.0
G4 vs P4: 1/3 the speed, 2.2x the speed.
Learn about CPI and get back to us.
Thanks for the chuckle. I will be sure to give SETI equal time. ;-)
There is no reason that other technology in computer coudl not be low power. They do it for lap tops, why not desktops?
Maybe what the PC really needs is a redesign, so that you can have smaller and lower power componets as standard. Maybe desktop PC should use pcmcia or some other small technology to make them not only low power, but smaller insize.
I don't want a lot, I just want it all!
Flame away, I have a hose!
Only 'flamers' flame!
Actually ... I wanted PPC for my home server, but there weren't any motherboards available (unless I was willing to buy one that came bundled with a whole computer system, including MacOS). So I ended up buying Athlon. This sucked in the summer, but now that winter is here, my room is the most comfortable place in the house.
I only wish winter could last all year.
---
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Well, in the world of high end servers, you obviously wouldn't. But not all servers are high end servers. Some servers are 99% idle, and those are the candidates for smarter power use. It's a shame the hardware isn't designed to make that easy.
Perhaps the hard disk guys should take a few months off from the race to make disks bigger (incidently, giving the tape drive guys some time to catch up) and spend their effort on other issues, such as 1) making their disks better at surviving power up and 2) reducing seek time.
---
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Most of the wear on servers is typically on their drives, so sleeping the disks would increase failures and shorten their lifespan. For example, the large corporation that I did contract work for in San Diego had about 100 PC/NT servers, with another 100 HP-UX servers. For Y2K, they had checked for possible issues with disks, but they only restarted servers and left the disk arrays going. This is because the spinning up/down of the disk increases wear and opportunity for failure (motor bearings, etc).
The second issue that is slightly incorrect is the state of California's power problem. The state deregulated and totally fscked up the way power was sold by allowing people to sell power at open market prices. Power plants were then purposely shut down, decommissioned, and reduced in capacity to raise the value of the price of power. For Example, you have 2 powerplants, PPA and PPB. They each create 1000Mw's of power at 1 cent per megawatt, for a total income of $20. You create an excuse to shut down PPB, causing a shortage of available power. This in turn raises the selling cost of power to 2 cents. You have just kept you same income but have halved your operating costs.
There is a shortage of power, but not because California's usage suddenly went insane. This problem started back in the early summer in San Diego, and no one took action until the end of the summer.
If you really wanted to conserer power, then have all the Slashdot readers retire Seti@Home until all blows over and let their boxes sit powered off or do Wake-on-LAN, as I am sure far more power is consumed by Seti@Home users in CA than by not-sleeping server processors.
Err,
Out Solaris 8 E250 has been configured for
power management on its 6 x 18Gb SCSI drives
for some time now.
20 Second spinup at the startup the day when
someone comes in. Lots of Heat/Power/Noise
savind the rest of the time (i.e. 18hours a day)
My tip: get yourself one of these multiplug power cables with a switch on it. It very simply turns off the printer power brick, the PC power supply, potentially the monitor supply, etc. That is, if you're not downloading pr0n while you're out...
Hurricane Application Group, Dept of Meteorology Control, Ministry of Proactive Defense
One thing that I have noticed are server rooms and workstations with their screens left on all the time - I feel that this is first place most people could start. And for people using NT, their is a DPMS aware screen saver available, it even includes the source code. I can't remember where it is, though a search on google should turn it up.
One thing that is worth noting aswell the cost saving for a corporation the size of Microsoft or IBM, if workstations were either put to sleep, or shutdown when not in use. I calculated it one and the savings per year was in the millions of dollars.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
One thing that I have noticed are server rooms and workstations with their screens left on all the time - I feel that this is first place most people could start. And for people using NT, their is a DPMS aware screen saver available, it even includes the source code. I can't remember where it is, though a search on google should turn it up.
One thing that is worth noting aswell the cost saving for a corporation the size of Microsoft or IBM, if workstations were either put to sleep, or shutdown when not in use. I calculated it one and the savings per year was in the millions of dollars.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
What's the advantage to this over a tradition UPS, other than being built into the case? Switching back and forth from two batteries will actually use more power than using the standard AC-DC-battery float-Inverter configuration that most (if not all) commercial UPS systems use.
It takes more energy to charge a battery to it's capacity than the capacity itself. This is due to various resistances in the charging system itself. With most batteries, you can only charge at a certain replenisment rate, as the chemical changes can happen only so fast, and any excess power during the cycle will be dissipated as heat.
Which, also incidentally, blows away your theory of "much less time to charge a cell than to draw it down". You can do this in small configurations (cellphone charger whilst using the phone at the same time), but I can draw down a deep cycle lead-acid cell faster than I can fast charge it with no load on it.
"All those tubes and wires and careful notes!"
"All those tubes and wires and careful notes!"
Does any one know how much the automatic monitor power down helps? What percentage does it usually reduce power?
Anm
-m
I was thinking the other day how much equipment I have at home that just sits there doing nothing most of the time. The amount of energy consumed by these machines is quite large. Lets see:
- TV, standby most of the day
- Video, same thing
- Printer power supply (I rarely use the printer), always feels warm.
- Power supply of PC's. Even when turned of, the power supply is still active. One of my PC's actually has a second switch on the back to turn it off. However, I rarely use that switch.
- Sub woofer, always has a led blinking.
- Adsl modem, comes with a power supply too.
- Microwave
- Refrigarator
All these machines are using energy constantly, even when I'm not there, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. That's a lot of energy.
Jilles
Heck, just use non-server-grade machines. I mean you can build your own server-class machine with APC support on a high-end desktop motherboard combo, and it will perform pretty close to spec with most server-class machines.
The LC2000R has power management, and I'm sure most current OS configs can take advantage of it.
You really need to check your numbers... Canada produces -far- more wheat than the USA does for external consumption. China is arguably the largest producer of food for internal use as they import very little. If you think the USA is free, you need to re-educate yourself, it's rapidly on it's way to a totalitarian regime. If the rest of the world's economy tanked, where do you think the US economy will land? Canada, Australia, EU, Japan, PacRim, China, Russia, and Africa are arguably a larger block of consumers than is represented by the USA. Productivity is at an all time low in the USA, drive an "American Car" -- are you sure? Check again, it was probably produced in either Mexico or Canada. I'll give you 50% of science though it is primarily raw science, you need someone from either Taiwan or China to commercialize it. The US spews huge amounts of toxic crap into the environment - causing worldwide problems - acid lakes in Canada, climatic changes that cause devestating natural disasters... If you do yourself a favour and rub together the two brain cells you were apparently equipped with, you'd discover that you are a complete fool.
M
Yeah, because Canada is so big in manufacturing...
Actually, yes it is. You might want to do some research about how much manufacturing we do here - I'll give you a hint... Look up the "Auto Pact" and the "NAFTA" and tell me about what it says with regard to automotive production levels in Canada. Having spent 3 years living down the street from a Ford plant that today produces -every single- Windstar that is built, I think I have a little more clue than you seem to presume.
Compiling in power management support on the test boxes I use cut the power bill by 20%. A lot of that actually seems to come from monitor powerdown rather than CPU idling, but with an Athlon drawing 60 watts of power at peak (or 240W once we all have nice quad athlon boxes) its still a substantial saving.
For most boxes the cpu halting BSD and Linux do will actually give almost as good results as the APM bios. On laptops APM bios is often measurably better as it is able to reconfigure SDRAM timings and the like in ways only practical for box specific code.
So, relocate to Banf, or better, Jasper.
the shutdown thing so that the computer came back to the same state after a shutdown that it was in before, then I'd shut my computer off at night. The way it is, I often have 5 minutes to get something off the computer and run out the door. If I have to wait 3.5 minutes for the thing to boot up then it won't happen, so I leave it running 24/7.
I know of the swsup program, but it isn't included in the stock kernel, and the only available patch is for an old version of the kernel. Besides, if I change it, then security patches will no longer work.
So, why are the kernel hackers resistant to this technology? If they are doing it for their own pleasure on their own machines for their own machines, why is an instant reboot feature not included? Why is 16 way multiprocessor support more important than instant shutdown and reboot to a hacker with one computer? My guess is that Linus, et.al., actually do know on which side the bread is buttered.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
Could you demonstrate, please?
-- Colin
...yet
At this point SMP doesnt play nicely with power management. You enable it, and DPMS *will* be automatically disabled by the kernel. Timing issues or something (I'm no kernel hacker).
But I'm fairly certain that the CPU's still do HLT commands. I've run some dualie servers with the case off (watching the LEDs on the RAID controller) and the CPUs ran CONSISTANTLY cooler than the same model box doing NT. And as any overclocker (or some laptop users) will tell you, heat = more watts fed in.
But really the problem with most servers isnt the actual CPU. Its the rows of case fans, redundant power supplies, and 10k rpm SCSI drives that suck the most of it up (ever seen the inside of a Dell 6450?). And you really can't put any one of those devices to sleep without reducing the usability and/or stability of the machine.
Dirk
I keep trying to pick fights, but I can't shake this Excellent karma.
Cold is fine as long as the components can warm up slowly (good fan cooling despite the ambient already being chilly). That'll keep solder joints from going brittle and will keep the drive platters from minute warpage.
Dirk
I keep trying to pick fights, but I can't shake this Excellent karma.
does the linux apm software support this, or is there another program that supports this, is there any program that supports this?
"we demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty!" --Douglas Adams, The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy
You don't think people starve in america?
Jherico
What can the average user can do to ensure his security? "Nothing, you're screwed"
The only 'server' machines (and I'm not talking apple vaporware) that are PPC based (POWER really) are the pseries (RS6k) and Iseries (AS/400) boxes from IBM. Don't really (per processor) perform any better than a PC server when it comes to CPU bound tasks (IO is another matter) and cost a whole lot more. The point is that these P series boxes are power hogs. I can't find the power ratings on these things anymore but let me assure you its not miniscule like the Motorola PPC's which are designed for embedded systems work that apple uses in the Macs.
When it comes to performance I am of course talking about industry wide benchmarks designed to measure real world performance between different platforms. You may have guessed I'm talking about SPEC, TPxx etc. Look at the spec suite before you say anymore, GCC, perl etc. Apple doesn't publish these numbers for the Mac because the OS doesn't support some things needed for SPEC (or so the common rumor is) which means that the OS probably isn't the kind of industrial strength OS you need running your server. Mac's aren't server boxes anyway, server boxes have features like ECC RAM, Hot plug PCI, Hot plug raid, redundant power supplies, Support for many gigs of RAM, OS's that have QOS metrics, and many other features. I will be very interrested to see SPEC and TPCC results from Apple's OS X.
Umm... I think you'd be hard pressed to explain how California's disastrous power situation stems from knee-jerk environmentalism. The problem is not that there isn't enough power, but that the power companies are broke because poorly-though out deregulation has led to them getting gouged by suppliers.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
Expanding a vast wasteland since 1996.
And on top of that when agri-biz was using spray delivery methods instead of hoses they were losing 60% of that 85% to evaporation as the water flew through the air, sat in the leafs, and finally hit the soil... That means 51% of the water was just sucked backup in to the air.
Also the Feds pay farmers in other states NOT to grow crops that compete with Calif. crops AND not many people think about saline in the soil from all the irrigation... The Veggie Valley is headed to become an alkali desert, and what happens to all the people who rely on the crops from there? Eat dirt?
The agri-biz as it is now is not sustainable. And this is where yours and mine next meal will (or not) be coming from.
Mr. Clueless,
Demand for power has gone up, true enough.
California buys its power from other states, true enough.
What would make power cheaper if they bought it from internal power companies? Subsidies? Good looks?
The REASON power is expensive is NOT because it's coming out of state, but that natural gas prices have gone up dramatically. Whether a power plant is in CA or OR or NV or wherever, half-assed deregulation IS responsible.
There's no environmental fault at all. If nothing else, CA should find more Natural Gas in it's own state. If environmentalists bitch about more drilling, then you have a vaild complaint. But your current one holds no water.
Kinda like Moe, but just a little more Kool
But, both my Amigae (1000, 3000/040) have fans :-)
Once I was at a place where they had a fairly large monitor connected to a crappy UPS. They kept the monitor off to save power. There was a major powerout for a few hours. Once I turned the monitor on to shut down cleanly the server, the UPS overloaded (monitors have a very high inrush current) and the server went down with it.
Moral: be sure to check your UPS can handle the inrush current before you try to save power.
That said, you don't need to keep the monitor on the server on.
We have about 50,000 sq ft and it's the raised floor cooling, AC, lights that suck current.
Note that if your computers use less power, you need less cooling.
In a commercial environment you can't get away with an SLA that says "we'll power down your
servers at random which will create 30% greater latency".
In load balancing situations, you could probably boot idle boxes out of the set. As utilization increases, you wake idle boxes up and bring 'em back in. It could be accomplished with little or no latency.
And suppose you offer a discount in exchange? A quick back-of-envelope calculation suggests that these kind of tricks would save a couple thousand dollars a year for cabinet of hardware in an California coloc.
oh great! i was wondering when you wackos where gonna pop up on this thread. people like you
c ience/FOOD hell why we only putting out 25%? seems a bit low to me, i think we should work on it!
are the reason CA and some of the other western states like WA are in the mess their in now.
Wow! Having opinions entirely unconstrained by facts is so much easier, isn't it?
The problem here in California is with a half-assed 'deregulation', which the utilities practially wrote. It has very little to do with environmental laws. Go pick up any recent edition of, say, The Economist.
25% of the CO2? ok... so what? CO2 keeps us from freezing our asses off! 100% of the worlds freedom/economy/security/consumers/productivity/s
Have you every actually left the country, pal? I've lived on four continents so far, and it's more complex than you think.
We hardly have 100% of the freedom or the security. For a first-world country, we have an extraordinary amount of crime and violence. We have about 5% of the consumers. The US may produce a lot of good science, but have you peeked in a faculty room lately? The percentage of native-born Americans is actually pretty small.
wish you chicken littles would just go hide in the corner till the world ends. [...] after all if your right it will be next week.
Try living in India or China for a month and then tell me what you think of environmental regulations, chief. In Delhi, many change shirts after lunch, as the air makes the shirts too grubby to look good for an entire day. In Xi'an, many people wear breathing masks in public.
Running background processes is not nice without the sysadmin's permission!
It may have been only one process, but it would sure hog the CPU since it doesn't execute many blocking syscalls. It would stand out on `top` like a sore thumb.
Depending on scheduler sophistication, it might cause user-noticible delays for a shell-server.
APM is basically useless for servers. You certainly don't want to be spinning down their disks (wear and high start-up power) and they don't have monitors attached.
The server OSes (*BSD, Linux, OS/2, and even MS-WindowsNT) all have HLT in their idle thread. When the machine has no tasks to run, it runs the idle thread. For x86 CPUs after the 486sl this automatically drops the CPU into powersavings. Typically a CPU that will draw ~20-30W will drop to less than 1 Watt at HLT. That's all you want.
APM is more targeted at desktops where it's especially important to turn off that power-hungry monitor (100+W) and to compensate for the failings of MS-Windows9*|Me which idles in a busyloop.
For non-x86 CPUs I cannot speak. I would hope that Sun & Alpha have something equivalent to x86 HLT powersavings by now. But my older Alpha 21066 does not. Perhaps the thinking is the machine will be busy all the time.
While I agree with many of the points raised here about server reliability and such, i'm amazed that nobody is mentioning the real cost of the extra power usage. What about the environment? Almost all of that electricity comes from fossil fuel burning, emitting greenhouse gases and possibly other pollutants. Strip Mining. Radioactive Waste from fission power. Birds killed by windmills. Valley habitats destroyed by damming rivers. Figuring out how to make computers (and everything else) use less power is really important. For an interesting related read, see Leaking Electricity for a discussion of power usage by household appliances.
SACRAMENTO - The California power grid was taken down today by a so-called "packet storm," where script kiddies coordinated themselves to ping every sleeping server in California to wake it up ...
Spinning up and down the drives is one thing, but there are other ways to save power. Many CPUs are able to micro-sleep (basically halt their clock) so they retain complete state (incl cache?). Any interrupt wakes them up. Even if it takes a couple of thousand cycles to come up to speed, this is plenty fast to respond to any external situation (*).
Appart from heat expansion/contraction, I don't see that this could add any wear or tear to the computer. In fact, as the cpu will tend to run cooler, this might be a good thing in general.
(*) if your computer can run a quarter of a second on the juice in the power-supply's capacitors after you yank the plug, this is something like 250 million cycles on a modern cpu. And I doubt it takes the cpu 1000 cycles to wake from a halted clock.
What the hell there are servers that are sitting idle. Why are these machines not crunching RC5? All my machines do.. so do the machines at work.. servers included.. hehe
JOhn
Campaign for Liberty
You folks in CA would probably be better off switching to Flat Panel monitors. Looks like about a 70% power savings compared to a tube monitor. From what I hear about the price gouging on power out there it'd probably be cheaper to buy the new FDP units than continue operation your old monitors.
Besides, once you start buying them maybe their price will come down enough so that we can do the same thing.
your 'mission' is most likely a small piece of [deleted]. like keeping a small department up. if it fails, not much of the world is going to be affected.
But if it fails his employment is likely to be affected. I've always taken "mission critical" as meaning "paycheck critical". B-)
Who cares about "the big scheme of things" when he's hunting for his family's next meal?
And it seems to me that the only "big scheme of things" issue I've ever considered important is whether "the people" can, individually, handle their individual issues. Like their quality of life. Which often comes down to continued employment.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Yes there is a point in sleeping hardware whether or not it makes a difference on the rolling blackouts! We should be conserving energy, not wasting it, and we shouldn't wait until things are critical before taking action.
First point: The truely limited resource is administration time. If you want to use it to save energy, you have a choice:
- You can throw it at the servers and save a little power, which is consumed at a time where it DOESN'T risk blacking out California.
- You can throw it at the clients and save a LOT of power, much of which is consumed at a time where it DOES risk blacking out California.
Take your pick.
Secondly:
We are less than a hundred million miles from a STAR for crying out loud. There is NO energy shortage. There is only an energy CONVERSION shortage.
The only reason we're still burning fossil fuels to generate power is that it's still CHEAPER than putting up solar panels or powersats.
And the only reason California is browning out is that government and left-wing pressure groups interfered with the market, first by throwing roadblocks in the way of building power plants until the capacity was too small, and second by imposing controls on the power market and breaking the feedback loop.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I had that happen on my VAX. It came down to whacking the drive against the wall... while off and parked of course.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
../linux/Documentation/Configure.help
Some links of interest:--
assert(expired(knowledge));
I've managed networks for 0-2000 client nodes for more than a decade now. I've seen a lot of desktops in that time. I can tell you that many people who don't want to deal with it immediately disable the power saving features as they deploy the desktops. In the last couple of years, I've started to insist that they go out with the power management enabled, with reasonable default settings.
On the server end, though, I'm not sure I see the potential. My systems are always designed around 7x24 availability. Not all the network operating systems I support include support for power management on the server. Aside from the lag time required to wake up after going to sleep, I also worry about the cyclical tasks that most servers perform that would keep waking it up - reducing power management to a performance drain and defeating any savings.
I guess the real question I've got is this: Why would you want your server to sleep? I can see powering down the monitor, but most of my servers don't have monitors. I don't like the sound of powering down RAID arrays. I could see slowing the CPU clock when it wasn't under load, but that level of power management is usually reserved for laptops, not desktops.
If my new servers started arriving with power management features, I'd probably disable power management.
http://drteknikal.blogspot.com/
then wakes them up when when /. links
;)
The authoritative server better goes to sleep too, cause it's the only reasonable way to handle the slashdot effect.
Just another coder...
I'll agree with you that the tape drives could do with a little catching up, but don't pretend that hard drives aren't improving in more ways than capacity.
1) There is no way that startup cannot be the most stressful mode of operation for a harddrive. There's this thing called Newtonian Physics which applies to most objects larger than electorns, making metal disks that took less energy to move from a stop to 7.5k-10k RPM than to keep moving at that speed would be a violation of Newton's laws. There is also the problem of electric motors, by nature they will appear to be of extremely low resistance when stopped and thus allow a relatively high current to flow when power is first applied (Combination of Ohm's law and lack of back EMF produced by moving a current through a B field as described by Gauss' Law). These sudden current surges can be tempered somewhat by good circuit design, but they cannot be completely eliminated. Drives are becoming more reliable overall and are better able to handle spinup stress, but the laws of physics can't be changed and they insist that spinning up a drive will be stressful.
2) Reducing seek time can be accomplished in a few different ways:
- Reduce disk diameter
- Move heads faster
- Increase rotational speed
All of these things are infact happening, 3.5" disks are now much more common than the 5.25" disks of yore and the 2.5" laptop drives are becomming more and more common, the problem is that when the disk gets smaller its capacity gets smaller too. Drive heads are moving faster by the day, but they too are subject to Newton's laws. If you want to move drive heads faster there's going to be more wear on the drive. Increasing rotational speed is probably the area where drives are making the biggest speed gains these days. Low end IDE drives are now spinning at 7500 RPM, a year ago the $100 drive was spinning at 5400. This stuff is really increasing fast and it's cool._____________
I don't want free as in beer. I just want free beer.
(Sorry, the spelling on that was atrocious).
...and always have been. The specifications aren't always fully implemented and don't perform reliably even in consumer environments - i.e. every shipping copy of Win98SE is unable to recover once the machine goes into suspend unless a patch is applied. In terms of (SME) servers, the suport hasn't existed. Windows NT4 didn't support the full capabilties of either spec, and while Win2K does, it is still not in widespread use. As for Unix-likes, Linux has supported APM for some time now fairly reliably, but some applications (specfically poorly written FTP servers) still have some issues with it. Anyone know about ACPI?
Powering down hard disks does indeed cause wear and tear, but there are other components - ie, monitors (if you use monitors on servers), KVMs, and even switches which aren't in use during certain hours which won't be significantly harmed by powering down.
Yes, have you ever tried using power management on Windows 2000? It's really not that great, I've played with it on many different systems, including laptops, here are some of my experiences.
:>
Standby mode: System either doesn't come up or only partially comes up when pressing key on keyboard or moving mouse. Seems to be random.
Hibernate: System freezes while copying contents of memory to hard disk, reset button needs to be pushed, "please use the shut down command from the start menu" message comes up.
Hibernate: System copies memory to hard disk properly, and doesn't ever shut itself down, just sits at that screen.
Hibernate: System copies memory to hard disk properly, and shuts down, when powered back up, sits at the "waking up from hibernation" screen for about 5 minutes, and gives message "Windows was unable to wake from hibernation, would you like to start normally?"
This is definitely the kind of reliability I'd like for my servers.
Why, no, I haven't meta-moderated lately. Thanks for asking!
Isn't there a saying that its better for a machine to operate underclocked and at full power for that speed then for a processor to be in sleep mode most of the time?
I do remember reading this somewhere before, and this is the basis of how AMD's Powernow and Transmeta's powersaving technology works. If the processor can actively tell how much power it needs to complete a task in a good amount of time, and can actively underclock itself to complete it, it will probably save alot more power than the machine that just goes to sleep when not being used.
Its almost like runners, if they pace themselves, they can get alot further along than if the gave it all they had, stopped when tired, and started over again.
Worst of all, something about the LAN causes the machine to power-up within about half an hour of shutting it off. To get the machine to let the monitor to stay in standby mode, I have to unplug the computer at night!
Microsoft had the chance (and the moral obligation, given their dominance of the market) to get that much right. They failed miserably. Microsoft, you suck.
--
Knowledge is power
Power corrupts
Study hard
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
--
Knowledge is power
Power corrupts
Study hard
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
--
Knowledge is power
Power corrupts
Study hard
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
--
Knowledge is power
Power corrupts
Study hard
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
--
Knowledge is power
Power corrupts
Study hard
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
"Its thing" is not usually logging, but kflushd syncing filesystems to disk. It's relevant to note that journaling filesystems typically bypass this mechanism to sync to disk on their own schedule. Overriding this to force the disk to spin down during what would otherwise be idle times is at least dangerous, if not impossible.
Its always sunny in Californieyea..so I've been told, so why don't you all just put some bigole solar arrays up on the roof? oh and stop downloading all that porn and mp3's and warez and you wouldn't need so many hard disks....
If you have a server farm and your servers sit 75% idle most of the time, I'd look at load balancing a little better first. If say you have a Dell running as a web/email server, a VAlinux running as a Samba, and a Penguin running as a MySQL server, there's your problem. You have WAY too much horsepower going unused. Load balance the apps onto 2 boxen, dump the third, and there's your answer to APM problems. If power consumption is such a big deal, why did you beef these boxen up in the first place? This is like me complaining that I use too much diesel driving to work in my Mack truck hauling 3 trailers and asking where I can find cheaper diesel. The answer is simple, dump the Mack and buy a Volkswagon. Problem solved.
"You'll die up there son, just like I did!" - Abe Simpson
There is no reasonable defense against an idiot with an agenda
:wq
W2K's power saving features don't seem to work reliably on any of the machines I've used. My Dell Inspiron 7500 worked the best, and even it would freeze shutting off the LCD panel every once in a while. Yes, I did have the latest BIOS for the laptop, and all the proper patches applied to W2K.
That's not my only reason for not using W2K, but one that applies to this topic.
Besides, heavily used, publicly accessable servers (web servers, email servers, etc) tend to be used all the time, so the power saving features would rarely get to activate. I have a tiny ISP of my own, and tried doing power saving on my servers... All I'd hear were drives spinning up and down all day.
Indeed. Another part you are ignoring is that laptops are made to conserve power. Servers are not.
Getting things back up usually costs more power then letting them spin & run. I don't know about you and your servers but mine cannot give up on those hourly cronjobs since some jobs simply have to be done. So basicly I think it would end up consuming even more power then it does now. Not to mention the extra wear and shortened lifetime on the hardware which will surely not please my boss.
A recent /. story had a MS drone pointing out that Linux didn't have the ability to hot swap out ram and cpu, a needed enterprise feature.
The ability to shut down a cpu, or a bank of ram would have great benefit in the large high availablity systems.
It wouldn't take much to extend this to power savings, which shouldn't affect semiconductors as much as mechanical devices.
If you had an 8-way 4Gb server, which goes mostly idle during extended periods, overnight or weekends, it could throttle back to 2 cpus and a gig of ram, powering the rest off. If the load average starts increasing, bring more cpus on-line. Same thing if there is a hardware problem, shut down the affected parts, and limp on the rest till its fixed.
Given that Linux has just (2.4) started supporting multi processors of this sort, it is a few versions away, but it is coming
Besides the wear and tear the HDD spindown and spinup puts on the server, you have to say
:/
goodbye to some things that I for one wouldn't miss. Once tried hard to make a server (for home use) which should spin down when there was nothing to do. It did and after some time linux woke it up to write som log entries and "do it's thing". Drive spun down. Linux woke it, drive spun down, etc...
Made me crazy. Saw patches wich could make linux stop doing "its thing", but as far as I remember it did so by disabling things that I wouldn't be without in a fallover situation
Thomas S. Iversen
There are too many things that can go wrong when drives spin up and down. Particularily if the drive hasn't been idle for a large period of time.
:)
I have had disks which have spun for years without problems in a server, but when taken down
in order to upgrade the machine in some way. Some disks don't survive. Why you might ask? The above post is one point. Another is that the heat of old drives really degenerate the components of the HDD and thus it can't stand the powerup cycle which normally puts more stress on the components.
Other HDD have used all the lubricant inside during the years, and when powered up after a server upgrade the HDD doesn't have the power to compensate for the not so smooth motion anymore.
If it ain't broken don't stop it
Thomas S. Iversen
What more is there to say - if the hardware has it, W2K supports it.
Servers are designed to run ALL the time thats why they have redundant powersupplies and hot swap hard drives and some even now have hot swap PCI slots, all so the server NEVER has to come down or is never brought down by a hardware failure except for system boards most of the servers I deal with have redundant everything so I would imagine its not supported because its supposed to acfcess the hard drives all the time and it is supposed to run at about 50% CPU usage all the time Just my 2 bits
no smart guy he is right co2 is harmless infact plants NEED C)2 you are thinking CO1 or more comonly carbon Monoxyide (mono=one=1 di=two=2) hence he is completely correct in stating that we could produce as much carbon dioxide(CO2) as we want infact everytime you exhale YOU create CO2
In the meantime, the powering on/off of hard disks is bad, bad, bad. They will die too fast, and can also actually use *more* power, since such is needed to spin up a hard drive.
But take this into account, how much power is wasted on cooling? Fans, and everything? Now this may sound retro, but i strongly believe we are are better off using *low speed* 5400 RPM drives, in a RAID rather than those monstrous 15000RPM units. The faster the RPMs, the more power they will require to spin up, and more is the heat they will release. Just a thought.
--
Artix
Your Linux, your init.
You think none of the planners had ever played SimCity.
Fsck cluebie moderators. I'll say what I want, offtopic or not. And fsck having to qualify every bloody statement just
I'm surprised nobody's hit on this yet. Ditch the x86 boxen and use PPC instead. The power savings could be significant, maybe 50% or better. (Unless you've been using the waste heat from your servers to supplement the office toaster and microwave.) No need to spin the drive up and down from sleep, just use an efficient processor.
Those millions of dollars that the gov't loaned out to the power companies could have been put to better use helping finance this upgrade. At least you'd have a better architecture to show for it, instead of 17 days later with no improvement.
for the humor-impaired.
Constitutionally Correct
whata moroon.
The current Slashdot moderation system is made by gay communists!
Compaq's servers have Wake on Lan support in the imbedded network cards, but I don't think the servers will support APM. But if you have a server that really could benefit from APM, I suggest you look at the Professional Workstations. I bet they have APM and they are as good as the low end servers. Some even have Xeon processors.
âoeIn theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are not." â Albert Einstein
We have around 600+ servers of assorted platforms and if power issues get to the servers its too late to do any good. First you need clean power or you're killing the server components. We buy all servers with dual power supplies and run power to separate circuits. Those circuits are on UPS's. The UPS are only good enound to keep the servers up while generators kick in. The main job of the UPS though is to maintain clean power to the servers at all times, so the servers don't need to worry about it. A complete outage will do less harm to a server than dirty power will. Good UPSs have monitoring campabilities that's what you want to watch. I use USP's at home too not to help in an outage but keep the power clean and steady. Especially at home with hair dryers and microwaves and so on causing power dips all the time. Low power can cause lots of problems thoughout a system.
Unfortunately, people like you vote.
somebody bent my whookey.
I'm sure this will open up a feeding frenzy to post this on Slashdot, but some of NT Admins can't do that. While some consolidate on 1 or 2 boxes, a well designed NT Network will host at least 3 servers, and they may only have a few dozen users. For example, you should have a PDC, BDC, and Exchange Server. If you combine the functions (which I've done at small sites), you open yourself up to headaches later on.
Besides, my PDC/BDCs get hammered as people log in, but there is little login during the day. Exchange doesn't get hit much at night, as only the coders are logged in and less e-mail is sent. This is a silly arguement.
where do you work? my servers have maybe 3 hours of non-use, so backups can be performed and verified...
If it costs money to implement and it's not going to sell machines, it's not going to happen.
--
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
Paranoid or not, I HAVE had multiple failures on a RAID 5 array once. Mind you, it was the controller that failed and marked 2 of 4 drives in the array as down. There was no recovery. Besides, powering drives up and down induces stress on their mechanical systems, which greatly increases the chances of failure. Besides which, downtime and/or reduced performance because of a RAID array in a critical state isn't free, and costs both worker productivity and money to replace the dead drives.
I used up all my sick days, so I'm calling in dead.
Plus the fact that drive spinup seems to be the time when a borderline drive will fail. The only 'safe' power management I can see for servers would be adaptively reducing processor speed in relation to CPU load. Sleep and suspend are dangerous on a server, especially since a power failure can happen at any time, even in places other than California. Servers need to respond to a UPS power fault signal at a moments notice. As for DPMS monitor power savings, I don't see any harm, the monitor can be changed with or without the server running, so there's little danger of downtime because of that.
I used up all my sick days, so I'm calling in dead.
CPU and video card power management would be far less worrysome, since there's no mechanical wear and tear that can be caused by them going in/out of sleep, with the exception of the monitor which can be externally replaced without downing a server. However, I'd be rather concerned that they don't go completely to sleep otherwise a power failure may cause the server to completely drain the UPS without trying to shut itself down.
I used up all my sick days, so I'm calling in dead.
Just FYI - Macs have comprehensive processor, display, and HDD power management options that work across the board (the same power management software that's in their 5-hr battery life iBooks is in their G4 servers). It's really a rather interesting read at http://developer.apple.com/technotes/tn/tn1190.htm l
:)
Although it's generally good to keep the HD spinning at all times (for reasons posted above) but there's no reason for a display to be sucking power or for a CPU that's idling (in terms of - is it doing anything for the next 1.5 seconds?) to be running at full power.
Beyond all this though... PC's require a TON more power to run simply thanks to the 10x increase in wattage used by the CPU combined with the power to run the fans to cool everything. Do CA a favor and get a mac
------------
"...and Maddest of all, to see Life as it Is, and not as it Should Be."
In fact, many Silicon Valley companies who have mission-critical hardware have moved that out of CA years ago. It was done as a matter of protection from earthquakes.
This is why the heavy-hitters like Intel and Sun are not too hard hit by rolling blackouts. They don't need the electricity to power hardware, just the lights.
-JTB
I may be wrong, but don't LCD monitors use a lot less power than conventional CRTs? Granted they cost a lot more, but certainly in California it might be admirable to spend more on LCD technology and thus cut down on power consumption...
Vote Libertarian
But aren't many servers idle during the night while people sleep?
Name one hour of the day when everybody in the world with Internet access is asleep. The world is more than the USA, you know.
Like Tetris? Like drugs? Ever try combining them?
Will I retire or break 10K?
This seems absurd. Power saving is for laptops that have very limited battery power. The CPU itself only uses 20 watts or so. Maybe more for really fast ones. That is less then your average light bulb. And shutting down the harddrives and spinning them up might just cause MORE power consumption unless the drives are down for a significant period. Spinning up a drive draws a LOT of power, expecially the 10,000 RPM ones found in servers (and my workstation :). So much that having multiple drives in a computer spinning up at the same time can fry your power supply. Not only that, but spinning up drives is really hard on them. Like most things mechanical and electronic, it is usually best to leave it running at a constant rate.
Its like your car. One could try to save gas by speeding up to 80 MPH then shutting off the engine and coasting down to 50 then start the engine back up.... This would ruin the engine and probably wouldn't save any gas. It takes more gas to accelerate up to 80 than it does to maintain 80.
Hey, maybe we can find some way to convert the heat from big servers back into electricity!
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
If you know your drive is borderline, you should replace it...
Karma: Good. I'm hoping in the same way as pizza is 'good'...
Sucker ;-) I could only afford half-dead 1200's
It's... It's...
"We can confirm that Debian does *not* ship the version with the trojan horse. Our version predates it." [CA-2002-28]
I guess that's one of the really cool things about the Crusoe; it adapts the speed of the processor to the load it has to manage. Recently people discovered that Crusoe is actually quite useful on server systems.
;-), so that should also be dealt with sooner or later. Having a constant 1% CPU usage (deh except with Mozilla of course ;-), I think I don't really need that fan most of the time, if only the design of my computer was a little more thought over.
Coming from an Amiga history, I still think it's a crime that normal home computers require a fan, anyway
It's... It's...
"We can confirm that Debian does *not* ship the version with the trojan horse. Our version predates it." [CA-2002-28]
When it takes several minutes to failover anyway (as is the case with Windows 2000 Advanced Server Clustering) it would be a tremendous savings to have the hard drives spun-down most of the time. The server's only purpose is to take over operations in the eventuality of a failed master server; it's power consumption most of the time is a complete waste.
I have some critical servers that I am responsible for and run network monitoring agents on these machines that poll for disk utilization, capacity, CPU load, network ping status...etc etc. Big Brother is one such network monitoring system I use. Others I have tried What's up, BMC Patrol, HP Openview. I know these do not take up much system resources, but the server needs to be 'awake' in order to collect and report network management data. Servers that are polled often do not get a chance to sleep unfortunately. Wake On Lan enabled servers will might never go to sleep if a network monitoring program is ping the server to see if it is alive every 5 minutes.
Speaking of power management... I send all my students to read this site, in the hopes that some power will be saved somewhere as a result. It's a noble cause... Users Guide to Power Management
oh come on. California has huge heavy industries, gigantic metropolitan areas, teeming millions of people with personal computers, dishwashers, air conditioners, televisions... its a huge, populous, and industrial state. The impact of the Information Industry is still a minor fraction of the total costs. Even if you turned out the lights on Silicon Valley completely, California would still have a problem, because they haven't built enough new plants to supply the demand (of a huge, populous, industrial state).
If you had the exact same deregulation fiasco in Texas, or New York, or Illinois, you'd see the same thing, and there aren't Silicon Valleys of even comparable size in any of those states.
Is it just Geek Hubris to assume that our industry is the most important and central over all others? I see this same thing on reports on how our economy is supposedly tanking right now, just because of the NASDAQ. There's an entire world out there beyond our walled garden, you know..
Don't blame me - I voted for Howard Dean. http://dean2004.blogspot.com
...to save power on a server i think. These machines definetly are the wrong place to save. I really like the idea of powersaving systems but on a server??? There are so many other machines running in a regular office wich could save power and honestly i dont feel comfortable about any power managment technics yet. These things just dont really work! I saw a TV Show lately where they said that the aircondition of the World Trade Center consumes as much energy per day as my hometown (munich/1.9million citizens). There are the real energy-suckers not down at the serverroom... Slightly offtopic: I live in germany and when i heard about the powershortage in California i couldnt believe it. It reminded me of playing SimCity 2000 and really messing the powerplants up, hehe...nom. Lispy
Monitors may consume as much power as the rest of the system combined (for an average system anyway). Using the DPMS suspend mode cuts that power usage to near zero. Not mention also increasing the life of the picture tube (it deteriorates all the time the monitor is on - eventually they start to get dimmer and fuzzier).
I thought the Linux kernel did that by default (use the HLT instruction whenever the CPU is idle)? I think Windows does that too, at least if ACPI power management is enabled.
That's not true for the switching power supply in a PC, if the system draws less power the PS will certainly pull less. (Think about it, if it didn't the thing would melt down - 250W is a lot of heat!) Only the crappiest-designed power cubes will use the same amount of power regardless of the consumption of the device (of course there will always be some wasteage).
Third, why don't computers and related equipment have small builtin UPSs? They already have DC power supplies, and DC is what is needed to charge most batteries. DC is what the computer actually needs, and DC is what batteries produce. Doing some battery backup inside each box would be pretty easy. How much battery does a little ethernet hub need? External UPSs need to make AC from DC (which is never terribly efficient) and they themselves become single points for potential failure. Sure, if you need a survivable facility, buy big UPSs and generators, but the failover and resistance to tripping over power cords would be so much better if each piece of equipment had a few minutes of backup built in. A well maintained generator should be able to start up and be running smoothly within just a few minutes. If the equipment itself could last a dozen minutes or so, there would be no need for any external UPSs other than for a few CRTs. As most power problems are very short, even home users would like a few minutes of backup time.
The internal DC voltage on a typical switching power supply is 340 Volts DC which corresponds to rectifying 240 Volts AC. If you are running on 120 Volts AC, they double it first which is what that little switch on the back sets.
It would be relatively easy to add the battery back up system at this point using a boost converter and a couple of years ago I heard about someone doing just that. As a bonus, this would make an online UPS with no transfer time. It would be easy enough to add this kind of functionality to any power supply with the appropriate external connector. Too bad they (the power supply manufacturers) don't.
amsdell and globtek come up with a search on Google.
that's why slashdot sometimes takes 40 seconds to load! they're using powermanagement!
Good job boys, and congrats on your enviro-friendliness.
---
I'm not ashamed. It's the computer age, nerds are in.
They're still in, aren't they?
---
I'm not ashamed. It's the computer age, nerds are in.
They're still in, aren't they?
The biggest problem that I see however, is that while a 10 second delay in waiting for a hard drive to spin up, etc. may not seem like much, most requests on a server do not come one at a time. By the time the server was fully ready to accept requests, it could potentially have hundreds of requests stacked up. Much like taking a drink of water from Niagara Falls. Not a pretty sight for those impatient people in your office that can't wait for ANYthing on their systems, much less first thing in the morning, when most servers are hit the hardest.
Although, getting servers to shut off their own monitors, or being able to put them into an effective forced sleep mode from say 1130 at night to 6am would certainly help the power problems.
Just my two cents worth, take with multiple grains of salt :-)
"See, we plan ahead! That way, we never have to do anything now."
My biggest concern about enabling power management on a server would be instability more than the added time for it to "wake up" I've noticed that on my workstations I occasionally get lockups or hardware failing tor respond until rebooted due to buggy power management.
:).
While it's no big deal to occasionally reboot a workstation due to these problems I don't think I would want the added stress of having to reboot a server because of this. Especially if it means getting out of bed at 5 in the morining because some early bird can't get x document off the file server
Does no good what-so-ever if the hardware doesn't support it. I believe this guy is refering to high end server equiptment. It takes a combination of hardware and software support to get power management to work. And even at that it's still so freakin buggy that I wouldn't trust it on a server.
I've started to see traffic lights using LEDs instead of light bulbs.
Traffic lights use a funky 69-watt bulb that's designed for longevity, not efficiency. LED traffic lights use just a watt or two, and have a burning life of 20+ years. (Also, since they use a string of LEDs instead of a single bulb, one burning out would have almost no effect on usability)
Multiply THAT by all the street intersections in California...
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
You should never have idle computers, you should always be using all the CPU power you can. And if you are not you should run the distributed.net client. And if you need a reason for this, which you shouldn't, it will fill your life with eternal bliss and happyness. Happy crackin'.
-Grant
|grant.henninger.name|
For many companies, the extra ten seconds it would take to spin up a backup server's hard drive(s) likely would be a non-issue.
My users get annoyed at sub-second response-time lags. What company can stand 10 seconds of wait? (Excluding NT servers, because users are used to the regular daily or weekly rebootal of their server).
Futhermore, I try to exclude every non-useful line of code from the OS and daemons that I run on the server. That includes power management.
Daniel
Yep, I'm fully in agreement with the wear and tear issues of power management. The spin-up and spin-down of hard drives is the one area that causes most wear and tear. I personally would not like to power down any drives for any reason on one of our systems running in the field. These machines (and the drives they contain) are DESIGNED to run 24x7 if configured properly. They are not designed (and in most cases, not desired) to spin down and spin up several times during a week, or a day. Why, in the world of high end UNIX servers for example, would you want your backend database/web/application server to even THINK of powering down one of it drives even for a SECOND? Especially in the high volume hits of today's I.T industry.
Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines
VMware lets you consolidate your "got-to-have-these-because-of-MS-licensing" NT/2000 servers into common hardware. You can even host the whole thing on Linux to allow you to more tightly monitor the individual NT processes.
Ask a silly person, get a silly answer.
Well, the other small problem with Linux, is when I boot, I get this nasty error message "APM is not SMP safe... Disabled." So I guess that kinda puts a barrier in the way. I really would like to be able to remotely turn off my computer, but if it means sacrificing one of my processors, forget it.
Surely there has to be more to power management than simply off or on?
forget for a moment that if a server is going to be idle long enough to need to save power (ie. at night) it would save double as much by simply shutting down completely..
Most devices remain at full power waiting to respond to requests at maximum speed. For power saving, this readiness can be reduced, but without shutting the device down completely.
Some devices do this already - CDROMs stop spinning after a few seconds, laser printers turn off the heater, etc.
It can't be hard to make HDDs and fans whos RPMs can be software controlled, or devices with electronics modularised so that parts can be turned off, but still keep parts that take a long time to start up (or most often fail on startup) powered.
(Besides, at the same time, I got a job cleaning up a gov't construction site. The boss, at one point, took a running hose and stuck the nozzle into a urinal to save himself from having to walk to turn it off. I mentioned the drought. "The government," he said, "does not have a water shortage.")
Similarly, a quick look at the laws of thermodynamics tells us that, for example, it takes more energy to cool a room because of a computer than the computer itself gives off. Air conditioning, lighting, and utilities for new residents are some of the reasons behind the brownouts in the golden state. A few idling CPUs and spun-down hard drives, while a Good Thing, wouldn't make much difference.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
LA's got cheaper real estate, cheaper cost of living, and plenty of qualified geeks looking for work since it seems all the studios are cleaning house on their Interactive Media divisions.
Come to LA, where you can run your servers 24-7 without risk! Who gives a fat rats ass if you run SETI on all the workstations after 5pm? We got POWER, bay-bee! Los Angeles is power self-sufficient and is even selling power to PG&E and SCE! Oh yeah, if you don't like the City of Los Angeles' business tax regs, Burbank and Glendale also have municipal utilities that supply 100% of their own power needs!
Brought to you by the committee to uplift the LA Geek Community.
----
http://www.msgeek.org/ -- Because you can't keep a geek grrl down!
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
But once the power comes back on you waste power to spin the HDs, Turn on Video, etc. For Worstations Great. Servers NEVER!. Put the monitor into sleep mode or use a KVM for 10 servers sure. When power goes out you want to be there to check the status of the UPS and if needed have it turn off when the juice is low (which should not happen). Besides Servers are still going to be used when the power is out.
Some power management is good for Workstations. (turning off hard drives after an hour, monitor after 15)
Power management for servers is not a good idea. Monitor would be ok but NEVER hard drives.
But once the power comes back on you waste power to spin the HDs, Turn on Video, etc. For Worstations Great. Servers NEVER!. Put the monitor into sleep mode or use a KVM for 10 servers sure. When power goes out you want to be there to check the status of the UPS and if needed have it turn off when the juice is low (which should not happen). Besides Servers are still going to be used when the power is out.
Some power management is good for Workstations. (turning off hard drives after an hour, monitor after 15)
Power management for servers is not a good idea. Monitor would be ok but NEVER hard drives.
Anyone know about ACPI?
Yeah. I asked Mr. Torvalds the same thing, he said no go for about six months (I was trying to get power management working on one of the new Crusoe Sonys).
z
When the HLT instruction is executed, the CPU sleeps until it gets an interrupt - usually a timer tick or an i/o of some sort.
I know that anything which increases the load on a FreeBSD system or changes the duty cycle of HLT causes the CPU temperature to change. It is amazing how a slight load change on these systems can overload marginally-adequate cooling systems and cause CPU problems.
So to tie this back to the original question - some servers actually go into a "micro" sleep mode - hundreds of times a minute.
Presumably, the power you're wasting isn't an issue as the brownout situation has passed. Obviously, you add a certain interval to ensure the whole startup doesn't propagate another brownout.
As far as the wear on drives/fans, we're talking drastic measures for drastic times here. If you have a power outage, you'll have to deal with the same powerdown issues, potentially in a less prepared state!
If a server had powerdown capability, it would also last longer on a UPS. In the event of a brownout/black out situation, if the UPS told the server to go into power save mode, the system would recover quicker when power came back up, and could live longer on ups power than a fully 'up' server.
All of our servers, from Duallies to a Quad Xeon support power management.
steve
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
Erp... IE tossed my cookies and just posted this as AC..
Everyone seems to be under the assumption that in a power-saving mode a system has to effectively be off? What's wrong w/ a partial powerdown? The CPUs in laptops can do it, why not on servers?
Carrying on the car metaphor so effectively used earlier; yes, a car that's got 100k mi of stop and go driving is going to be in worse shape than one that's been driving long distances on open road.
OTOH, consider two cars used for open freeway driving, one cruises at a respectable 65mph, while the other is constantly redlined, and driving as fast as it can go, the one that's run harder isn't going to last long (ie Indy/Nascar motors generally get replaced after each race)
So, why run a drive at 10k RPM all the time, when it'll more than do the job at 5k? Why run your CPU at 1GHz, when it can handle all essential functions at half, or a quarter of that?
Continuing w/ the car analogy, what's the point of running the engine as hard as you can, if you have to drop down to 2nd gear to flow with trafic? (Perhaps having the clutch partially engaged would be a more accurate way of describing idle CPU cycles)
Dealing with drives could probably be done on the controller in such a way that the OS wouldn't even have to deal with the process, and modern CPUs, with their cores running at nearly 10x their external speeds, would have little problem dropping their multipliers to only 3-4x, with no visible effect to the rest of the system (not to mention the reduced heat production, and it's effect on procs)
And really, the CPU and drives account for most of the energy use in a high-performance computer. Unlike a desktop, where the monitor is another big issue, many servers, such as those in cluster/farm situations, don't even have their own monitors.
In todays rapidly moving hardware world, where this year's high-end servers are next years doorstops, implimenting, and geting adopted new standards should be a relatively simple task, as long as MS agrees to support it (as for the big iron (or Macs...), with thier proprietary OSes, having the technology supported is even less of an issue).
my sig's at the bottom of the page.
Actually, the reason CO is dangerous is because it because it binds more tightly to the hemogloben (sp?) (the sticky part of red blood cells) than does oxygen, thereby rendering those blood cells useless. CO2, otoh, binds less tightly than oxygen, which is what allows our lungs to exchange the co2 for oxygen...
I went out to the power meter the other day and timed the little wheel as it went around. Under normal load, it took about 19 seconds. I went in the house, shut down a SPARCstation, an SGI Indigo2, and a generic PC that were all running unnecessary services, and went back out to the meter. This time it took 21 seconds to go around. I went back in the house, turned off a few lights, and checked again. About 55 seconds this time.
With large servers, the proportions are a bit different, but the point is the same - computers are pretty damn efficient. Go look at any heavy industry and you'll see that all the computers in the world aren't going to make that big a difference in overall power consumption.
good point. IMHO another good idea would be for load-balanced servers to put one in suspend when there is low traffic
--IronHelix
well if you have one app/db/http/etc server running then you have neither the want nor the need for it to go offline. In such a case, the first user that wants something is going to be waiting 10-45 seconds for it to come back online.
However, if you have cluster servers, redundant servers or load balancing where several servers do the same job, but not all the time, then APM is good. For example, say you have a website with a loadbalanced HTTP cluster and a redundant backup cluster. You would want one of the main machines to be always on. When it got overloaded it would wake up one of the others, and grab more of them as load increased in peak hours. Then when everyone went to bed it would suspend those it woke.
For the redundant cluster, they should be kept in a constant state of suspension, but be ready to wake up should the main cluster fail.
As for reliability of the drives, thats why you have RAID arrays. I would rather periodically weed out the weak ones and have the RAID re-distributed than shut them all down, and half dont come back on. Its absurdly unlikely that two drives are going to fail at the same powerup. If one dies, then thats OK. If two dies its not. Give them all ample opportunity to fail and they will do so one at a time. Give them few opportunities and they will die in clumps.
--IronHelix
you mean the people who drive the Honda Insight, right? that car shuts off its engine whenever it can, and I hear the fuel economy is terrible - something like 70mpg.
Yes, but the Insight is actually a gas/electric hybrid, so in traffic jams won't actually start the engine up at all - just the electric motor. It's also got a sub 1000cc engine. I was talking about your average car with petrol engine.
--
ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US!
Spinning up and down drives will (depending obviously on your load and spindown configuration) actually end up using more electricity, in worst case scenario. It's like people who turn their engine off in only light traffic jams - starting it up costs a lot more fuel than just leaving it running at idle. With desktop PCs it makes sense, since they tend to honestly do nothing at all unless people are sat using them (lets discount seti@homers ;-) ) for long periods of time, so you can make a big power saving.
:-)
The other thing here is that as various people have pointed out, the most common failure point on drives is during spinup - the time at which most stress is being exerted on the drive. If you've got a big ultrareliable server, you'll want it to stay that way, and the best way to do this is by keeping everything the same. The car analogy fits here too. A car that does 100,000 miles in its life with lots of stopping and starting and small journeys, will be considerably worse off than one that just ran for long distances.
In case anyone was wondering - the adverse wear+tear of power up/down also affects PCs (cpu/PSU/drives), and even monitors. I've seen it happen often enough, and it would be interesting to know how much money the PC hardware industry makes out of components failing early due to "power saving" measures (be they system controlled or little Johnny turning his PC off at night).
If we move over to better renewable resources, like vast farms of hamsterwheels - this won't be a problem
--
ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US!
They just die suddenly, one day, after a long and busy uptime.
(And usually, always the day which they will be of utmost importance)
-- javaDragon is an instance of JavaDragon.
Actually the crazy Californian's, have got them all crunching away, running the useless "SETI@HOME" program. Thus a DOS attack wouldn't be noticed!! (Actually, it might save energy).
"SETI@HOME" is fairly useless, since the program is only looking at 1/15000th of the useful RF spectrum.
So here you are, consuming upwards of 50watts/hr extra per cpu + A/C costs + poor power factor(50% multiplier), running a nearly useless program. (right up until the lights go out!!!)
Note: 50watts my general estimate of difference between halt/idle mode and full blown usage of CPU/FPU/cache/memory subsystems. Also 'M$' screen savers stop running once they blank the monitor. (some thing you should always do anyway.)
"Halt/idle" CPU mode is used by default in single CPU's os's like NT, BSD, and LINUX.
"Halt/idle" is also the default in SMP os's like Linux & maybe W2k.
"Halt/idle" mode must be activated or have an extra program installed in W95, 98, NT SMP, & ME?.
Look for program call "rain" on ZDNET free download site.
Maybe it's time for 'M$' to run some Public Service adverts on how to cure the energy suck
aspects of the consumer OS's!!!
If you live in California it's time to re-evaluate you prioritys and STOP wasting cycles/energy you don't have on useless projects.
The system I envision would have two batteries. When both batteries are fully charged, the server would disconnect itself from the grid and draw power from one cell until it's nearly discharged. Then, it would switch to the other battery, reconnect itself to the grid to recharge the first, then disconnect itself again when fully charged. Like a normal UPS, it would detect when grid power is no longer available, and could initiate a shutdown. At any given time, there would be at least one fully-charged or nearly-fully-charged cell from which to draw power. All of this assumes, of course, that it takes much less time to charge a cell than to draw it down.
WWW
Plus the problem isnt the couple of servers per organisation, its the hundreds of employees that leave their machines on 24/7 running seti.
Slashdot: Proof that a million monkeys at a million typewriters can create a masterpiece
I assume that Power saving only works if there arent frequent power downs and power ups, if these machines were power saving for 1min then had to power up again there probably wouldnt be much (if any) saving whereas the wear on the servers would be a lot greater.
Slashdot: Proof that a million monkeys at a million typewriters can create a masterpiece
On my Win2K machine, I have created a special power management scheme: "NEVER!" The monitor never sleeps, the hard drive never spins down, and the computer never hibernates. I only have the Beziers screen saver (used to be "Curves and Colors", but change is good) that activates after 6 minutes (and there are times when I deactivate the screen saver altogether; CD-R jobs and defrag sessions are two such scenarios).
In short, would you like a webserver or file server to be sleeping on the job when people are trying to access them? HELL NO! Uptime is of the essence. Unless you're being charged $13.50 per kilowatthour, then keep power management drivers out of your server!
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
Instead of serving the users better, the companies just decided to kiss the EPA's butt. As for chaining the legislators to bike/generators, let's do it! It's a win-win situation with that plan (if it works, yay, more power. If they die, yay, less snooty legislators!)
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
Microsoft covers all the bases, you people are stuck in the outfield.
Cunning linguists
Just a little correction: Alpha probably runs under Digital Unix, not DGUX. DGUX is a Unix flavor by Data General.
I can just imagine some car companies and new presidents blaming the power outages on all those electric cars sucking power away from American Buisness.
about damn time!!!
finaly some people with brains!!
you guys must not have gone to public/government schools. other wise you'd be crying about the trees and how we're killing "mommy earth".
i bet you guys evan PAY TAXES!
have JOBS?!
oh stop me i'm out of control!
GAG!
run hide now...
the government will come save you!
military is NOT government! it can be but in our case it is NOT! I have no beefs with the US military. I thank them for puting their asses on the line everyday protecting us! as for the rest... there was life before the FDA and any other three lettered Government agency! and there will be life long after they destroy them selves, or we wake up and destroy them!
"(You will notice it was the government that forces us to recycle, promotes power saving appliances, enforces smog regulations, etc)"
do you need them to hold your dick for you when you piss too?
There is a generic "hibernate" patch for the Linux kernel, but it doesn't seem to have ever made it into the main kernel tree. Too bad.
Servers don't support power management because quite simply power management is a bunch of arse. Next question?
Karma: Shitty (mostly due to American moderators)
I used to have a Mac SE at work with a hard drive that would not spin up at powerup. I would hold it in the air with one hand, and whack it really hard on an edge to spin the whole Mac. The momentum differential would cause the platters to break free and spin up.
;-)
Another colleague's monitor would occasionally go on the fritz, and a good whack on the side would shape it up.
(Let me add to those about to reply that abusing machines are not good for their longevity, these were pretty much shot anyhow, and we all wanted new machines.)
This technique only occasionally worked with software.
Actually, environmentalism is part of the equation, as well as the aforementioned "deregulation." Due to pressure by environmentalist groups, CA hasn't built a new power plant in 12 years, while the demand for power has gone up due to growth in the high tech sector. As a result, California has to buy its power from other states and countries. When the "deregulation" was imlemented, it made it legally more difficult to raise prices on consumers. Since CA didn't have the necessary native-produced power to accommodate everyone and power companies weren't allowed to raise rates to reduce people's consumption, they had to buy more and more power from outside sources (losing money to do it). So, bad things might have happened without pressure from environmentalist groups, but it wouldn't have been this bad.
Today's sig brought to you by http://www.swankypimp.com
Management doesnt know about power saving options at all and i think most sysadmin wouldnt care more or less if the server had power management... ;D
I always disable it on all workstation, cause i think its irritating and second it feels more stable when running windows
Do you want people to have to wait on your website or wait for a DHCP address or such while you harddrives spin up? Thats what gets annoying about my home DHCP server, but it would drive me crazy to listen to an old HD trying to spin all day.
Is there a way you could only use the power managment at night though?
If you haven't ever used a real raid cage/dedicated box, each drive is powered up sequentially, in order to save the power supply. If you too a good dothill raid box with 18 scsi drives, and powered them all at the same time, the power supply would go POOF in a cloud of smoke. Read your hard drive specs, they use a ton of power to spin up. All decent raid controllers spin each drive up one at a time, to not influx a surge of power. Imagine a noc with 1000's of hardrives, they all just power up at one given time, the ups' would crap out in an instant from the instantaneous load.
===sam=== free nessus vulnerability scan = www.vulnerabilities.org
Power supply fans, hard drive motors, they take on the most wear and tear during power up. Always have.. They are 99% of your power utilization. Thats where all the power is, the redundant power supplies, the raid unit.. I certainly wouldn't want my n+1 power supply to be sleeping, when the primary fails.. besides, a nice raid 0+1 which i use at work, takes upward for a few minutes to power up correctly, Stage that with some sleeping power supplies, and your talking minutes of down time. I'm sure most unix apps won't tolerate that. Most noc's use polling software like whatsup and redalert.com service, which test your sql server etc, won't work... You cali folks just need to have off-site backups in states where there is no issue. (Hint: i have an empty noc, msg me:) or just keep the lights off. I highly doubt "the internet" is truly eating up all of your power. How many light bulbs to computers are there in California? Why dont ya turn some of those off? ==sam=== free server vulnerability scan = www.vulnerabilities.org
===sam=== free nessus vulnerability scan = www.vulnerabilities.org
APM is not a solution where power problems are an issue..
As said below, if you have issues with your power feed - obtain a UPS! If the project is mission critical enough to not be disrupted by power loss, then a UPS should be involved and should have been realised at the start.
Also, in regards to power usage of 'idle' servers - When a server is at idle, the power draw from the HD is extremely low.. Of course it depends on the size of the server - but again, if your project is that important then the cost of powering a redundant server should have been an addressed issue from the start.
I like the idea, but we need to look again at the whole heat and a/c issue.
See my journal, I write things there
Lets not forget, just because the servers get APM doesn't mean they will be used. Lets not forget the workstation machines that do have power management and most of the time it is not used. The best thing to be done is have a power saving initative done by the state of CA to give power-saving companies a small tax-cut, or some other insignificant rewards for doing something that benefits you anyhow.
When was the last time your house was invaded by the cuban military? Gee, sounds like you depend on the government yourself! You've food you buy in stores is safe to eat, the advertising you see is not making false claims. Tons of other things you depend on the government for so don't give me crap about suggesting what they should do about their power problem.
Meanwhile, my employers spend less money under my management than they ever have before, and this is even with the huge increase in the price of power. I've done my part, I was merely suggestion a way to motivate the masses. (You will notice it was the government that forces us to recycle, promotes power saving appliances, enforces smog regulations, etc)
Finally, there is simple corporate stupidity at work. There are frequently computer rooms that are cooled by AC -- even in the winter, while surrounding offices are being heated. In many cases, simple ventilation would do wonders to reduce energy usage by allowing the computers to heat the surrounding offices.
I think that it is far too easy to pin the blame on the Internet, but I would like to see some numbers. If we want to save electrical energy, I vote for turning off the lights on Interstate highways and on freeways. Cars have headlights and, an an amateur astronomer, I don't need any more light pollution.
A while back there was a message thread on the FreeBSD Stable mailing list dealing with a comparison of heat output (Linux vs FreeBSD) on the same SMP enabled box. Discussion got down into the internals of when to sleep a processor.
Snatched from thread: "Under SMP, there is more than one cpu. If one cpu is asleep in a HLT, and the other one changes the run queues, there is nothing to wake up the sleeping CPU even though there is now a job in the queue. So.. we let the cpu spin looking at the "queue not empty" bits so it never gets caught sleeping on the job." Peter Wemm peter@netplex.com.au
Thread is a little dated but quite relevant to why power management is not a good idea on server class machines.
FreeBSD -Stable messsage
1. The (server) drives aren't really meant to be spun up/down - it's a hardware thing.
2. The latency it would cause, slowdown in business processes etc. would, I'd bet, cost more than the saving in electricity. Don't know about *your* company, but my users require their files _now_, not after the drives spin up, plus transmission time across the LAN/WAN.
3. I think my shop is typical. I have people on my machines nearly 24x7 - there is always some activity on the servers - and if it ain't the users, it's my maint time, including backups.
Display some adaptability.
As a side note, that was a problem with lots of MacSE's and for a long time Apple would give you a new drive if you had one of the affected models. Unfortuantely, Apple isn't handing out 40MB Seagates anymore.
There were also certain Sun workstations that had the same problem, and the 'official' fix was to drop it from a height of 8 inches during boot.
No -- This is a reason to bitch about Microsoft. In 1995, some of their "Product Managers" came in to our company and promised us that NT 4.0 would support APM (and Plug'n'Pray) as part of a sell to get us to standardize on NTW clients.
They backed off on that promise, and punted the feature to NT5, which was going to ship in 1997 or 98 or 99, or last year. In the meanwhile, laptop vendors had to hack their own APM drivers, but desktop support hardly shipped. Bottom line is that there's 4 years worth of NT machines out there that can't even shut down the monitor when idle.
> And in the land of the rolling blackout, one has to wonder if the potential power saved could help the situation,
I'm not sure personally.
More power means more jobs for men in power plants.
This reduces unemployment, improves the power infrastructure, and increases the power capacity.
Reducing power consumption OTOH, just buries the problem under the carpet - there's still the same power shortage issue, but it's just been postponed a little.
My solution:
everyone turn on all their high-drain electrical appliances: hairdriers, heaters, computers, etc., and leave them on 24 hours a day - for example, my PC has been on all of January and I haven't turned it off or rebooted it once. We also have the heating on max and all the windows open.
This is the most public-spirited thing I can think of in this situation.
I.e. so that they have to increase the power supply accordingly.
This means that power will be cheaper (as volume increases, cost reduces), and there will be capacity to spare.
Sorry, but no way are you going to be able to hot swap RAM or CPU without significantly slowing down system operation all the time. Hot-swapping RAM would require that all signals in and out of the socket go through special buffer chips that allow turning off one side (the hot-swappable device) while leaving the other side (the motherboard) running. Besides costing a lot, it would add several nanoseconds delay -- and high performance computers can't spare the time.
What you can do, maybe, is to put your RAM and CPU (or maybe 4 CPU's) together on a plug-in board and hot-swap that. The backplane connecting several CPU boards and disk controllers wouldn't have to run quite as fast as the CPU to RAM bus. So I don't see any fundamental problems with it -- but I know from experience that designing even low-speed hot swap hardware is very tricky.
About GE, I would think that it was no coincidence, but not a sinister plan either. They just had someone smart enough to realize that CA's half-assed so-called "de-regulation" was bound to lead to shortages. And that didn't require a genius. I learned enough economics in the 6th grade to know that's the probable outcome of de-regulating the wholesale market while freezing retail prices. Add increasing demand (the population of CA is increasing) and severe restrictions on increased supply, and it's not probable, it's certain.
"Being Biggest and Baddest is used to sell, efficiency is not. I expect this will soon change..." Not while the State of California is subsidizing cheap power with taxes levied on the inefficient and efficient alike. When they let the electric rates rise to match the supply/demand situation, then there might be a little interest in efficiency. Or maybe just a lot of interest in building new plants to crank out more not-quite-as-cheap electricity -- because it's quite likely that making computers more efficient really isn't all that cost-effective, as compared to all the other ways you could save energy, and that new power plants are both cheaper and less environmentally harmful than many ways of "saving" electricity.
The extra ten seconds might not seem like long -- but most web-based business could loose all of their customers that way. Imagine if the webpage you are loading takes an extra 10 seconds. Though not a significant amount of time, we have grown impatient enough that most people will not wait the extra time -- thinking that the page is down, broke, or full of advertisements.
On the flip side of the issue... I used to do tech support for NICs, hubs, switches, etc... One of the major issues we found was that sometimes Power Management would turn off the NIC, and it never would spin back up.... What that meant was that they lost network connection until they rebooted (definitely not good for servers).
Even at home, I have it Disabled. Why? Because every time I have it disabled, half of my hardware becomes unusable within a matter of minutes (granted -- that is with Windows, I have not noticed the issue in Linux) -- like my SCSI card.
In summary, I think the biggest reason is because it is not very reliable (from a tech support point of view) and because the extra 10 seconds (to users, the OS, etc) sometimes registers as a timeout.
http://www.google.com/profiles/malachid
If you're running idle 75% of the time, and have 3 servers, remove one of the servers. There, now you cut your "server power usage" by 1/3, and are being more efficient with your resources. Sell the other one for petty cash or take it home.
Oh, but then the network resources will be overdrawn!!! Duh, and that's why you have 3 servers whose resources are available to all users, all the time, even at peak hours.... damn those pesky peak hours.
Protector of Capitalist views,
Protector of Capitalist views,
Meorah
get a freakin KVM.
Protector of Capitalist views,
Protector of Capitalist views,
Meorah
Those interested in this topic might want to look at the recent paper titled "Balance of Power: Energy Management for Server Clusters". It proposes a power-aware SLB switch. http://www.cs.duke.edu/ari/publications/balance-of -power.ps
http://www.cs.duke.edu/ari/publications/balance-of -power.pdf
http://www.cs.duke.edu/ari/publications/balance.ht ml
The authors would welcome any comments: contact info is in the paper.
Whether the processor is idle, the hard drive spun down, or the LEDs flashing on the front o the computer, the power supply is still eating the same amout of power. Power supply current usage varies only minutely, except in the various states: On, Off, and Standby. The EPA Energy Star program specifies a watt limit for sleep modes. For consumer appliances I believe its less than 3 W. For a computer I'm sure its higher, more likely 30 W. The point is, spinning down the hard drive will not save electricity. The power supply will just dissipate more heat and magnetism in the transformer coil. Same goes for all those AC adapters in your house. They all use the same amount of power whether they're hooked to you CD player or not.