Slashdot Mirror
Making Your Datacenter Into Less of a Rabid Zombie Power Hog
Nerval's Lobster writes "Despite the growing list of innovative (and sometimes expensive) adaptations designed to transform datacenters into slightly-less-active power gluttons, the most effective way to make datacenters more efficient is also the most obvious, according to researchers from Stanford, Berkeley and Northwestern. Using power-efficient hardware, turning power down (or off) when the systems aren't running at high loads, and making sure air-cooling systems are pointed at hot IT equipment—rather than in a random direction—can all do far more than fancier methods for cutting datacenter power, according to Jonathan Koomey, a Stanford researcher who has been instrumental in making power use a hot topic in IT. Many of the most-publicized advances in building "green" datacenters during the past five years have focused on efforts to buy datacenter power from sources that also have very low carbon footprints. But "green" energy buying didn't match the impact of two very basic, obvious things: the overall energy efficiency of the individual pieces of hardware installed in a datacenter, and the level of efficiency with which those systems were configured and managed, Koomey explained in a blog published in conjunction with his and his co-authors' paper on the subject in Nature Climate Change . (The full paper is behind a paywall but Koomey offered to distribute copies free to those contacting him via his personal blog.)"
are a renewable resource.
I've pointed this out a number of times. But people do not seem to "get it". If you can reduce your power consumption then there is less waste heat and then less cooling cost. Note too that if your applications use lots of disk reads/writes and network IO with the cpu in a waiting state then you can save power by using a lower end gear. E.g. laptop chips and slower memory vs full blown "Enterprise" hardware.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Last few years we went from 30 some database servers to a dozen at most
Modern hardware is insanely powerful and you get a huge bang for the buck consolidating a few servers onto a single machine
Why can't there BE UPS with ATX DC out?
Most of out workloads are light on CPU and heavy on ram in relative terms. Our "building block node" is a low power CPU system which takes upto 1TB of RAM and costs less in terms of capital than Dell's closest system and uses about half the energy. We keep them for 7 years under maintenance and run them "hot" in terms of utilisation, only expandeing the estate when their software predicts a resource pinch in the next 6-8 weeks, enough time for the boss to approve and me to install.
AG
So for years I've been hearing that it's much cheaper to throw faster hardware at a problem rather than tuning an application or a server. It's finally coming back to bite us. Imagine if tuning had gained a 10% or 15% improvement. How much power and millions of dollars does that translate to?
I think I used to work one of those.
Worked on a team with a huge DC install base, our biggest problem is we had ops so busy rolling out new capacity skus or upgrading current skus, there was never any time to decommission old skus. Management was too afraid to just shut them down, so 1000's of old sku machines just sat there doing nothing but sucking power. Talking to others in the industry, it sounds like this is a common issue.
Given that data centers are basically big electric heaters doing some number crunching along the way, might be sensible to put them in cold climates rather than hot, so a) it's easier to dump all the heat generated and b) that heat has some practical uses.
"I bless every day that I continue to live, for every day is pure profit."
Switching off and on the hardware will wear it out for various reasons: power supply are more likely to fail when switching on, hard disks mechanical parts suffer from hot/cold cycles. It means switching off for power saving cause the hardware to be more replaced, which also has an environmental cost. I did not read TFA, but from the summary, I understand that the benefit outweights the cost, is that correct?
How much power is thrown away by running the server applications in slow bloated interpreted languages instead of native aplications?