Tech Watch | InfoWorld Staff » Big Brother eyes data centers

July 28, 2006 | Comments: (0)

Big Brother eyes data centers

TAGS: Hardware

An innocuous piece of legislation, Senate Bill 3684, is looking at data center power consumption. The bill would authorize the EPA to study electricity use and encourage the use of energy-efficient servers.

Although it is only a study that is how the EPA started when it looked at air quality. Now, thanks to further legislation we actually have cleaner air to breathe.

Who knows where this study of servers and data centers will lead. If the government gets it right it might be a good idea. But what do senators know about data centers and about how to make them more efficient?

Maybe they'll decide all you need is two processors in every server. Highly unlikely but there is one company, Azul, that is offering 96-way and 384-way processor cores that are more power efficient by an order of magnitude over traditional Intel and AMD processors.

While a traditional two-way server might use up to 1000 watts, an Azul 96-way uses 700 watts and the Azul 384-way uses 2500 watts, according to Stephen DeWitt, president of Azul.

The processors are used to run managed code environments like Java.

Grid computing, if used improperly can actually waste more energy than save, according to Kevin Esptein at Scalent.

If you organize a grid so that it has a bunch of computers always at the ready in case more compute power is used, the grid may raise the efficiency of computer cycles on each server but at the same time there will be far too many in standby mode wasting watts.

Scalent designs data center software that is able to turn on and off servers and delegate applications on the fly.

Meanwhile, AMD is spearheading, along with other equipment manufacturers, the effort to build green servers and data centers. You can go to their site thegreen-grid.orgto see more.

Here's the bottom line from Congress

"It is the sense of Congress that it is in the best interest of the United States for purchasers of computer servers to give high priority to energy efficiency as a factor in determining best value and performance for purchase of computer servers."

I couldn't have said it with more redundancy myself.

Posted by Ephraim Schwartz on July 28, 2006 03:00 PM

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