The worldwide consumption of energy to power computer servers cooling equipment, and related infrastructure gear doubled from 2000 to 2005
The worldwide consumption of energy to power computer servers, cooling equipment, and related infrastructure gear doubled from 2000 to 2005. If data center energy use trends continue for the next three years, the IT industry as a whole will be responsible for creating 10 new 1000-megawatt power plants, simply to sustain itself. Those are the essential findings of a report released this week by AMD and Lawrence Berkeley National Labs scientist Jonathan Koomey, available at [1]. But this forecast is not inevitable according to a recent U.S. EPA Report, datacenter energy [2] consumption could be cut with relatively minor efforts by datacenter managers, including turning on available power management features, enabling higher rates of resource consolidation, shutting off unused servers and improving infrastructure operations.
Our commitment as a group involves creating power-aware middleware to contribute to building energy-efficient data centers. Our group consider that consolidation with energy efficiency goals still has a long way to do beyond the use of virtualization. We are working in new opportunities to improve the energy efficiency of systems, reducing the resources required, without negatively impacting the performance or user satisfaction.
[1] J. Koomey. “Estimating Regional power consumption by servers: A technical note” Final report. Desember 5, 2007. Available at: http://www.amd.com/us-en/assets/content_type/DownloadableAssets/Koomey_Study-v7.pdf
[2] Report to Congress on Server and Data Center Energy Efficiency Public Law 109 431 . U.S. Environmental Protection Agency ENERGY STAR Program . August 2, 2007 http://www.energystar.gov/ia/partners/prod_development/downloads/EPA_Datacenter_Report_Congress_Final1.pdf
The name is SPECpower_ssj2008. It evaluates the power and performance characteristics of volume server class computers. With SPECpower_ssj2008, SPEC is defining server power measurement standards in the same way they have done for performance. The SPEC team say that the drive to create the power and performance benchmark comes from the recognition that the IT industry, computer manufacturers, and governments are increasingly concerned with the energy use of servers. Currently, many vendors report some energy efficiency figures, but these are often not directly comparable due to differences in workload, configuration, test environment, etc. Development of this benchmark provides a means to measure power (at the AC input) in conjunction with a performance metric. This should help IT managers to consider power characteristics along with other selection criteria to increase the efficiency of data centers.
