The Making of Energy Efficient Datacenters
The Crooked E: The Unshredded Truth About Enron is a wonderful movie to watch. It is based on the book, The anatomy of greed, written by a former employee of Enron, Brian Cruver. One interesting thing that comes on our minds is the size of all power companies. They are all huge. We all depend on power for just about everything and yet very rarely do we think about conserving energy. A typical PC for example takes about 135 watts of power. A data center with about a 1000 servers should typically take about 135 x 1000 Watts or 135 Kilowatts and that would just power the computers. This does not include the air-conditioning and lighting. According to to a research paper sponsored by The California Energy Commission in a datacenter about 50% of the total energy consumed is by the servers and about 35% is the air conditioners.
Here are some interesting research done in this field -
Feeling the heat- An interesting paper by Liebert describing the challengeof effectively managing the heat dissipation in datacenters.
Heat-Density Trends in Data Processing, Computer Systems, and TelecommunicationsEquipment- This white paper provides valuablecurrent data and best available insights regarding historical andprojected trends in power consumption and the resulting heatdissipation in computer and data processing systems (servers andworkstations), storage systems, and central office-typetelecommunications equipment.
This problem can be solved by making better energy efficient airconditioners and by making more energyefficient computers. Many companies have taken a lot of interestin subject. However, nothing substantial has been done primarilybecause of the market requirements. The end users still want to hosttheir sites on the fastest processors which drives the market with thelatest processors. Going at this rate we would reach a time soon whenthe energy required would be much higher than the energy available inthe market.
Intel, AMD, Transmeta and Via have all released processors whichconsume very low power. A typical Pentium or AMD processor consumesabout 25 Watts of power, whereas these low powered processors take onlyabout 5 watts of power i.e. about 5 low powered processors wouldconsume as much power as a single main stream processor of today. Theselow powered processors are also generally fan less processors whichmeans lower noise levels too. Intel has the centrino which has a lowerpower consumption than the regular pentiums. Intel also has the armprocessors but those are RISC. Our prime focus would be AMD, Transmetaand Via. They all have some very promising products.
One thing to be noted is that most of these low powered processors workonly at about 1.2GHz or lower. So they won't be as fast the pentium4s.Which means one would have to host lesser sites per server. A goodrecommendation would be upto a maximum of 600 sites on aregular pentium 4 server. A low powered processor should comfortablytake about 200 sites. One advantage of these low powered processors isthat they have a very small form factor too. This means that one canhave more such servers in the same space that is typically allocated toa high powered servers. All datacenters use a profitability matrixbased on the following rule: Performance/PerWatt/Per Cubic Foot. This is one place where the low poweredprocessors really score high.
AMD Geode? NX Processor familycomprises of the AMD Geode? NX 1250@6W processor, the AMD Geode?NX 1500@6W processor and the AMD Geode? NX 1750@14W processor. Thefirst two in these consume only 6Watts of power and run without acooling fan. According to AMD they provide the highest x86 performancefor fan less operations. They are based on the mobile AMD Athlonprocessor technology.
Transmeta was one of the first companies to develop low powered processors.For a long time Transmeta was known as the company where theMicrosoft co founder Paul Allen had interests in and the placewhere Linus Trovalds, the father Linux, worked. Both of them are nolonger part of the organization. Today they are known for the twoprocessor families they have - The transmeta crusoe andthe transmetaefficeon
Transmeta Crusoe?-processors range from 500Mhz to 1.2 Ghz. According to Transmeta,Crusoe is a unique combinationof software and hardware. It's this radical design that gives Crusoe itsimportant advantages, and manufacturers of all kinds of electronicdevices their first truly innovative new platform in over 25 years.Thanks to Crusoe, mobile devices can be made smaller and lighter thanever. These new devices will be more comfortable to use, too, becauseCrusoe generates very little heat a problem that plagues the industry'slegacy hardware-only processors. And because it uses far less power,mobile devices running on Crusoe run far longer on a single batterycharge, and Crusoe-powered ultra-dense servers do far more work perwatt, far more efficiently.
TransmetaEfficeon processors are the higher end processors from Transmetaand they run at upto 1.6Ghz and have high performance I/O interfaces.They are built upon Fujitsu's next-generation 90nm silicon technologyfeaturing transistors with a length of just 40nm.
The entire Transmeta range not just uses the x86 instruction set, theyalso have full multimedia instruction support (MMX, SSE-SSE2).Transmeta has done very little in marketing in terms of selling theirproducts for the server market. Like all other companies they havefocussed on mobile products, set-top boxes etc.. While these productsaregreat for the mobile market, they do have a great potential in theserver market. FIC, JM-Net etc. have some products for the servermarketwhich run on the Transmeta processors.
Via, the Taiwanesemanufacturerpurchased the Cyrix processors and has since gotten out of the race offaster processors with AMD and Intel. Instead they are focussing on fanless, low-powered processors. They have the Eden and the C3 range ofprocessors. The power consumption varies from only 7watts to15Watts. Additionally, the processors come with thePadLock Hardware Security Suite which provides a platform approach tocomputer security, ensuring uncompromising security performance. Thesefeatures include the implementation of the Quantum-based VIA PadLockRNG (Random Number Generator), and the VIA PadLock ACE (AdvancedCryptography Engine) supporting AES encryption.
According to Via, the VIA Eden-NProcessor is the world's smallest, lowest power and most securenative x86 processor. It is a mere 15mm x 15mm in terms of size andconsumes between 2.5W @ 533MHz to 7W @ 1GHz.
Via again like Transmeta has not focussed in the server market. Theimages above give a good idea of the benefits of this processor in theserver market. For datacenters, Via may be the best in thePerformance/Per Watt/Per Cubic Foot matrix.
Companies like Hitachi make some very good low powered hard disk driveswhich have a very small form factor. They have both IDE's at 7200 rpmas well as SCSI hard drives.
Many may think it is better to take higher end servers as the power orheating problem does not directly affect them. As mentioned earlier aserver driven by a low-powered processor would be able to take justabout 200 sites. This means that a person with 600 sites would need totake 3 such servers instead of one higher powered server. Here are somebenefits of this scenario.
One of the biggest factors influencing the performance of sites on theinternet is the capability of the network card (ethernet) .When all sites arehosted on just one server, they all would use the same networkcard to push the data. Now if these sites are distributed among 3servers the amount of data that the sites can push would be 3 timesmorewhich means faster access to the sites. Another benefit is that if oneof the site goes down all 600 people would not be effected, rather only1/3rd the number of sites would be affected.Hence, the number of support request would be lesser. And finally, suchprocessors are very affordable. Typically they would be just a third ofthe cost of regular mainstream processors.
Amarjyoti Krishnan heads bobcares.com, a tech support company for webhosts and ISPs. He is the co-founder of Poornam Info Vision Ltd., a software and IT services company which specializes in Linux based solutions for Webhosts and ISPs. Poornam Info Vision is an ISO 9001:2000 certified company with a team of over 100 engineers.
Amarjyoti is a Computer Engineer based in India and has over 7 years of experience in the hosting industry. He has spoken and written extensively on the subject. His articles have been published both online as well as in print in magazines.
http://poornam.comhttp://bobcares.comhttp://amarjyoti.com
