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Energy considerations are playing into data center buying decisions, according to a survey commissioned by Sun Microsystems.Conducted by Harris Interactive, the study found that IT executives are increasingly aware of energy, with three quarters of the nearly 200 executives queried saying energy efficiency has become a buying priority.
On the other hand, the study found that many IT directors--38 percent of respondents--do not know how much they are spending on electricity.
Energy Efficiency Considerations For Data Centers [news.com.com]
How do you manage your power requirements?
What do you do now to help save energy?
Works everywhere, not only datacenters! :)
Datacenter-specific things that come to mind are mousemilking by comparison. Unused wallpack transformers unplugged, unneeded cards and drives removed, replace CRTs with LCDs... might save 40% as much power as the bulbs, and take 1-3 years to realize cost savings. HIH
Datacenter-specific things that come to mind are mousemilking by comparison.
Boy, that just is not true!
A big problem currently for large data centers is simply finding a location where the electric utility is able to provide sufficient power. That is why so many are now locating in the Pacific Northwest.
Most data centers make extravagent use of space. Reason: there isn't enough room on the roof for the air conditioning equipment that would be needed to cool the building with a greater equipment density.
It's a HUGE problem that is getting bigger. More efficient processors from both Intel and AMD are going to help. Virtualization is going to help. (Move under-loaded legacy servers to virtual servers.) Some server makers are going to DC power solutions. (A single DC power supply to serve an entire rack of servers. Can be more efficient than every server having it's own power supply.) Obviously, use the most efficient air conditioning equipment you can.
I'm far from an expert at this - but I did stay in a Holiday Inn Express last night! ;)_
The lights? Now THAT'S mousemilking.
I'd say of all of this, the most bang for the buck for the average company running their own internal datacenter would probably come from virtualization. Of course, that depends on the availability of virtulization support for the OS. How many servers are there at how many companies that are just sitting there doing practically nothing to serve a handfull of users that run some ancient mission-critical application? Plenty.
The lights? Now THAT'S mousemilking.
If every American home replaced just one light bulb with an ENERGY STAR, we would save enough energy to light more than 2.5 million homes for a year and prevent greenhouse gases equivalent to the emissions of nearly 800,000 cars.
And that's just if every American replaced [b]one[b]. The average per home is probably near 25 (guessing) so the 'carbon savings' would be equivalent to taking 20 million cars off the road.
No doubt that datacenters waste a lot of power also though!
Personally I think governments should subsidize energy saving measures like this (including those taken at data centers). They could pay for it by selling carbon pollution credits to compaines that are slower to adopt more energy efficient technology (perhaps because it would require a whole new plant for example). That way we start reducing overall carbon emissions now and individuals/companies that take the initiative don't have to take a temporary hit in the wallet.
Companies themselves could make a big impact also by making some small changes. In Arizona, for example, brand new houses costing hundreds of thousands of dollars are built every day and old fashioned incandescent light bulbs are used to fill the sockets. Since the home building companies could buy in bulk their cost for incandescents would be only a fraction of what we have to pay at the store, plus they could market it as part of their 'super energy efficient home'.
There are other things they could do too, like using high-albedo roofing (which would be especially great in Arizona) but I digress ;)
They can't force all of the consumers in the world to replace incandescent bulbs with fluorescent. The question was what can THEY do.
The "mousemilking" response was naive about what datacenters can do. Certainly much more than unplugging unused wall warts. Power use is a huge problem for datacenters. I perhaps incorrectly interpreted it as meaning that a datacenter could do more by changing-out their lighting than anything else. (Of course, they probably already have high-efficiency fluorescent lighting - which is probably unnecessarily turned-on all the time! :) )
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As far as lighting goes, the unfortunately fact is that fluorescent lighting is still architecturally unacceptable. The industry has yet to come up with high-efficiency lighting that also puts out a pleasing color, is dimmable over a wide range (fluorescent still isn't - not to "architectural" levels), has good directional characteristics, can be used in a wide range of fixtures, etc.
I recently remodeled, and really wanted to go fluorescent. But I was disgusted with the ugly fixtures, prices, and lack of control. Sorry, it's MR-16s, plain-old light bulbs, and halogen capsules, and a bit of xenon (under the kitchen counters).
I'm afraid the only efficient lighting I have is a few cold-cathode tubes in my computer rack cabinet (#*$!ed my cabinet) and inside the kitchen cabinets (behind frosted glass - #*$!ed those too...) I may even go crazy with some EL wire in the kitchen toekick...
(p.s. WebmasterWorld word filter kicking in, LOL! Just for the record, what I did to the rack cabinet and kitchen cabinets refers to the kind of thing they do on that TV show, "#*$! My Ride"...)
Another simular (and earlier) setup from archive.org
[archive.org...]
I remember mention somewhere of using copper bus bars to transfer heat from CPUs to cooling systems.
[note to overzelous mods, the forum at the bottom is the INFORMATION and technical specs]
I think one of the issues is that improvements in silicon (smaller die size, process, leakage) all go into making faster CPUs instead of re-working older CPU designs to use less power. The latest A64 or Core CPU is overkill for small servers, word processing and most office work in general.
Shame we can't just build data centers in Alaska, that would solve the aircon problems.
The problem with DC is primarily the upfront costs. DC server equipment is not cheap and retrofitting a data center to handle DC power if it does not have it already can also rack up the dollars. For a lot of operations that doesn't make sense. We were fortunate to have a DC power infrastructure in our data center that we could leverage.
For data centers without DC capabilities, I think encouraging use of virtualization technology is big. If you can get your development teams to use a virtual environment instead of a new heat producing, power consuming server for every project you are going to benefit.
We've been using DC powered servers for a couple years now...The problem with DC is primarily the upfront costs. DC server equipment is not cheap and retrofitting a data center to handle DC power if it does not have it already can also rack up the dollars.
I was referring to DC solutions where there is one power supply per rack. No "DC power infrastructure" needed.
What are you using? 48V?
Telephone companies run all of their switching center equipment off of 48V DC. Historical. Banks of batteries. :) So, you can order routers, servers, etc. in 48VDC models. I'm sure there are a few here who have accidently ordered the wrong model, went "huh"?, and returned their order to get one with "a normal plug".
Yes, it's more expensive, as it's a speciality product.
I didn't realize that there were people outside of the telecom industry using 48V equipment...
Anyway, per-rack DC power as well as per-rack air conditioning are some trends to watch. Lots of high-density blade server racks with per-rack DC power.
