Energy Star For Servers Falls Short

tsamsoniw writes "The newly released Energy Star requirements for servers may not prove all too useful for companies shopping for the most energy-efficient machines on the market, InfoWorld reports. For starters, the spec only considers how much power a server consumes when it's idling, rather than gauging energy consumption at various levels of utilization. That's like focusing on how much gas a vehicle consumes at stop lights instead of when it's moving. Also, the spec doesn't care whether a server's processors have one core or multiple cores — even though multi-core servers deliver more work at fewer watts. Though this first version of Energy Star for servers isn't entirely without merit, the EPA needs to refine the spec to make it more meaningful."

Comments

No, it isn't

[Idaho]

That's like focusing on how much gas a vehicle consumes at stop lights instead of when it's moving.

No, it's not. As usual, car analogies are stupid.

Cars do no spend the majority of their time idling at traffic lights. Computers (especially servers) however do often end up idling a very large percentage of the time.

Data centers do charge for (actual) power usage, so of course the actual (typically 95th percentile) usage should be taken into account, but still it's a broken analogy.

Re:No, it isn't

[mangu]

Cars do no spend the majority of their time idling at traffic lights.

I live in a place with severe traffic congestion problems, you insensitive clod!

Seriously, I think the car analogy is not so bad here. Too many people drive in the inner city using cars designed for cruising in an open freeway. Consider this: if so many cars weren't used in congested traffic, where would traffic congestion come from?

Re:No, it isn't

[MobyDisk]

Actually, I disagree. The analogy is very good.

Cars do no spend the majority of their time idling at traffic lights. Computers (especially servers) however do often end up idling a very large percentage of the time.

Both statements are not universally true.

Taxis, for example, may spend the majority of their time idling. So do big-city rush-hour commuters. And many servers idle 90% of the time, while others idle 10% of the time.

You can't make blanket statements about cars idle time, or computers idle time, since it probably varies 10000:1 based on the usage.

Re:No, it isn't

[iamhassi]

"That's like focusing on how much gas a vehicle consumes at stop lights"

No, it's not. As usual, car analogies are stupid.

I'd have to agree, bad analogy. MPG at stoplights is 0 for all cars since you're not moving. You'd have to come up with a whole new rating scheme if you wanted to determine how much gas a vehicle consumes at stop lights, like ounces consumed per hour while idling.

I'd say a better car analogy (if you must have one) would be to focus on what a vehicle gets on the highway only... and I mean all highway: fill-up, drive 60 until empty, fill-up again, compute mileage. Sure, it's a useful number, but it probably won't help you determine daily usage.

Re:No, it isn't

[Zerth]

Unless that CNC is the chokepoint for your shop or doesn't interact with any other resources in your shop, it should sit idle some of the time. Otherwise you are just creating excess work-in-process inventory.

Yet Another Bogus Car Analogy

[Brama]

Comparing a server idling to a car in front of a red light is seriously wrong. Servers in general tend to spend a _lot_ more time idling than cars wait for a red traffic light. There'll always be servers that _do_ fully utilize their resources, but most of them will idle a lot. So it makes perfect sense to take that as a generic guide-line.

Re:Yet Another Bogus Car Analogy

[Abcd1234]

No. The biggest reason for virtualized servers is that everyone noticed that typical servers spend much of their time idle, so if we throw a 4 servers into one physical box, the hardware will stay utilized. This means we need fewer physical boxes, which means we need less power.

Except, of course, that those servers? Yeah, they're typically busy *at the same times*, because when they're busy, they're busy because people are working.

Personally, I'm extremely skeptical of the idea that virtualization means that overall utilization of hardware settles in at a higher median. My bet is that what you really see are larger swings. ie, all the servers on the virtualization box becoming busy during the same times (ie, work hours during the week), and then going largely idle during the same times (ie, at night and on weekends).

This is a great v1

[sirwired]

Speccing by idle power consumption was a great idea. How exactly was the EPA supposed to grade servers based on CPU "efficiency" when each CPU differs so much? Which of the bazillion CPU benchmarks out there do you choose? This would be a short trip into an epic flame war between vendors, meaning that the spec would never get passed. "Politics is the art of the possible"

Given that most servers spend almost all their time idle anyway, this could certainly be a big money and energy saver. If you ever stroll through an actual large datacenter, you can see, via HDD ligts, that most of that gear just sits there all day long, doing little actual work. Certainly there are some servers lit up constantly, and virtualization will help to clean some of the idle servers up, but many shops don't do much virtualizing yet.

SiWired

Re:Atom

[drinkypoo]

FAWN is what Google is already doing. If you tried getting even cheaper compute nodes you'd run into price-per-port problems making it all talk. There IS a form of this that works, though, It's called blade computing, and we do it already. Using a stack of 500 MHz Geodes is NOT an effective way to get work done. Turning off idle servers IS. Server consolidation IS. Using a stack of commodity systems IS sensible, but not super-gutless ones. You need sigificant computer power per network port.