Intel is promising to ease the problem of spiralling
power consumption in datacentres.
The company is developing "low utilisation" server technology
which it said could deliver up to 24% power savings. Intel
estimated this could amount to £55,000 in savings annually for
enterprises with 500 servers.
Power supply is a major concern in the construction and
operation of a datacentre. The more electricity a server farm
consumes, the more heat it generates. This requires extra air
conditioning for cooling, which itself consumes more power.
Richard Fishera, vice-president at Forrester Research, said system
power consumption and cooling was now an issue for many mainstream
datacentres.
One user who experienced a power shortage was Richard Steel,
head of ICT at Newham Borough Council. Steel found he had an
electricity shortfall when he upgraded the council's datacentre to
Hewlett-Packard blade servers. "We had to get a lot of power into a
small space and we knew the new location would need an electricity
sub station," he said.
A survey earlier this year of 122 IT directors by analyst firm
Gartner found that insufficient power was their main concern with
the facilities required to support their primary datacentres.
One of the big shifts in Intel's strategy revealed at last
week's Intel Developer Forum was the need to address power
consumption issues. Intel chief executive Paul Otellini said
significant decreases in computers' wattage consumption could save
billions of pounds in electricity costs globally.
The chipmaker began focusing on power efficiency in 2003 with
its Centrino mobile platform, but last week's announcement expanded
the focus on power efficiency beyond notebooks to cover desktops
and servers as well.
The Intel roadmap will introduce a range of processors next
year, spanning server, desktop and mobile systems, providing users
of 32-bit systems with more power at the top end, and moving
notebook users further towards Intel's stated goal of a full day's
battery life by 2008.