Power consumption in the datacentre has come under the
spotlight following last month's Intel Developer Forum, where it
was a key theme.
The electricity costs of datacentres not only affect in-house
facilities, but also those that are outsourced, where this cost is
passed back to the user.
Owen Williams, head of IT at property firm Knight Frank, said
power consumption had not been a high priority in the past. "We do
not identify our electricity costs separately from our overall
premises costs in our in-house datacentre," he said. But he added
that the firm's outsourced datacentre providers were looking to
charge more for blade server racks due to power demands.
John King, enterprise server manager at Hewlett-Packard,
recommended that users considering adopting blade servers assess
their datacentre facilities in terms of electricity
requirements.
However, a study by analyst firm Gartner found that users do not
generally examine power consumption issues within server farms.
Intel chief executive Paul Otellini said, "The importance of
performance per watt is obvious for things you carry along with
you, such as laptops - you want higher performance and longer
battery life. But increasingly it is essential for things beyond
mobility."
Otellini said power efficiencies would be gained as desktop and
server hardware moves to multi-core processor architectures. These
servers and desktops will be able to achieve greater performance
without increasing the clock speed of the server, which boosts
performance but can be costly in terms of power consumption and
causes chips to run hotter.
According to Intel, power and cooling costs have become a large
part of the total cost of ownership in datacentres. Increasingly,
companies are measuring a platform's capabilities in terms of the
amount of performance achieved per watt consumed.
Typical power consumption
A basic Citrix-style implementation with the servers having two
discs, 4Gbytes of memory, redundant power supply and dual Intel
CPUs would use the following:
24 blade servers
- 10,685 watts
- 36,488 British thermal units
- Weight including 42U rack: 557kg
24 1U servers
- 11,753 watts
- 39,407 British thermal units
- Weight including 42U rack: 530kg
Source: Hewlett-Packard