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Energy Star For Servers Falls Short

Posted by timothy on from the is-there-no-market-for-such-ratings? dept.

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."

10 of 69 comments (clear)

  1. Improved Version Coming Next Year by 1sockchuck · · Score: 5, Informative

    All fair criticisms, but it's a first step. The EPA plans to address many of the shortcomings of the current Energy Star for Servers program in an expanded Tier 2 spec that is scheduled to arrive in the fall of 2010. The update is intended to expand the program to include blade servers and servers with more than four processors.

  2. Atom by googlesmith123 · · Score: 5, Informative

    Intel is releasing an Atom cpu for servers. It's not very powerful, but I reckon it has the highest power per watt of anything out there.

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    1. Re:Atom by derGoldstein · · Score: 5, Interesting

      There's also the FAWN project (also on /.)

      Cores-per-die is not a valid metric, not with emerging prototypes that could drastically change how web content is served.

      --
      Entomologically speaking, the spider is not a bug, it's a feature.
    2. Re:Atom by drinkypoo · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
  3. No, it isn't by Idaho · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    --
    Every expression is true, for a given value of 'true'
    1. Re:No, it isn't by value_added · · Score: 5, Funny

      Well, it's less broken if you consider that in major metropolitan areas, cars do spend much of their time idling at traffic lights (typically with air conditioning running), as well as on congested city streets and freeways. Then, of course, there's the drive-thrus for those too fat to get out of their cars. ;-)

      As for car analogies generally being stupid, yeah, you're right. But so are most of the alternatives. The reason why "sound bites", for example, are preferrable to hour-long analyses or 5,000 word flabby blog posts isn't that people don't want a full understanding, it's just that doing so is too much work. It's like having to evaluate a car purchase based on specifications instead of ... oh, wait.

    2. Re:No, it isn't by ergo98 · · Score: 3, Informative

      Data centers will often outsource whatever "idle machine time" they have to various institutions, at least if they have any sense.

      I think you just imagined that.

      Very, very, very, very (x4) few data centers do anything of the sort. And the truth is that the vast majority of servers spend the vast majority of their time waiting for something to do.

  4. Yet Another Bogus Car Analogy by Brama · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  5. I'm looking forward to completing your training by BadAnalogyGuy · · Score: 3, Funny

    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

    In time, you will call *me* master.

  6. This is a great v1 by sirwired · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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