ITS News

Filed under: Cooling, Energy conservation, Green technology, Server virtualization, Sun

As part of its Eco Innovation Initiative, Sun shined a green-hued spotlight on its massive datacenter consolidation efforts yesterday and unveiled a host of tools and services to help datacenter operators inject some energy-efficiency and eco-friendliness into their own facilities.

At a high level, Sun’s boasting significant benefits from the massive undertaking, most of which affected its datacenters in Santa Clara, Calif., but also its Blackwater, UK, and Bangalore, India sites.

In Phase One of the project at its Santa Clara site, Sun consolidated 2,177 servers down to 1,240. For example, they replaced 88 Sun Fire V880 systems with 58 Sun Fire T2000 and T1000 systems yielding a 91 percent reduction in datacenter floor space and a 60 percent reduction in power costs.

The company also consolidated 738 storage devices down to 225; and 550 racks down to 65 (reaping 88 percent compression of square footage). Power-wise, the company is shrinking consumption from 2.2MW to 500KW, which will result in an estimated $1.1 million cost savings per year.

In Phase Two, which entailed a new datacenter design, build-out and deployment, the company went from 254,000 square feet of facility space to 127,000, and it expects to reap another 30 percent in energy savings.

Sweetening the effort: Sun’s enjoying nearly $1 million in rebates and awards from Silicon Valley Power, including a one-time $250,000 cooling innovation award, the first award of its kind given by the utility.

Sun estimates that the company’s datacenter efforts will reduce its CO2 production by 4,100 tons per year, trimming 1 percent from the company’s total carbon footprint. (The latter stat is pretty interesting; most companies don’t get quite so detailed as to the size of their footprint.)

One of the most intriguing aspects of Sun’s new datacenter design is its pods: modular, scalable clusters of racks or benches that have the same requirements. The design will enable Sun to easily and quickly swap in and out racks, as well as deploy modular power, cooling, cabling, and monitoring equipment. Planning for future growth, Sun designed server racks to support a capacity of up to 30kw per rack.

There’s a lot more detail about the modular design and other technologies and practices Sun employed on the company’s Web site. I recommend that you watch Sun’s Energy Efficient Datacenter Tour on the company Web site. It’s pretty interesting and informative, and not too market-y, either.

In addition to showing off its shiny new datacenter facilities, Sun unveiled several products and services to help companies wring more energy efficiency out of their own datacenters.

Among them, Sun unveiled three Eco Ready Kits: The Sun Eco Assessment Kit, The Sun Eco Optimization Kit and the The Sun Eco Virtualization Kit.

The Sun Eco Assessment Kit “provides a methodical approach to analyzing datacenter energy efficiency, using a combination of assessment services for systems, storage, and datacenter infrastructure.”

The Sun Eco Optimization Kit is designed “to help customers optimize, consolidate, refresh, and recycle their hardware infrastructure … .”

The Sun Eco Virtualization Kit “offers virtualization solutions that enable better asset utilization and datacenter energy efficiency,” according to Sun.

Additionally, Sun announced its Eco Services Suite, which encompasses four offerings:

• The Sun Eco Assessment Service for Datacenter, Basic, which is intended to help customers maximize power and cooling efficiency in the IT infrastructure running Web-based services;

• The Sun Eco Assessment Service for Datacenter, Advanced, “a comprehensive datacenter service providing a technical evaluation of datacenter energy use, cooling capacity, rack placement, air distribution and other environmental factors”;

• The Sun Eco Cooling Efficiency Service for Datacenter, aimed at helping companies “recover misused air conditioning capacity and direct it to the areas where it is needed”;

• and the Sun Eco Optimization Service for Datacenter, through which Sun provides direct assistance with implementation of corrective actions outlined in the Eco Assessment Service.

Filed under: Energy Star 4.0, Government, Hardware

Every so often, I’ll google the term “green technology,” just to see what’s going on in the green-tech-o-sphere. An interesting nugget popped up today: Erie County, New York (population of around 925,000) has passed a law requiring county officials to purchase Energy Star appliances when possible.

OK, so in and of itself, that’s not Earth-shattering news. Perhaps Earth-hugging news, though. But more important, it’s a good example of how green-tech awareness has infiltrated the consciousness of politicians at not only federal and state levels, but also local levels.

The move is good news for Erie County, because it means lower energy bills. It also good news for companies like Dell, Fujitsu, and HP, and others that have been working diligently to keep up with the latest Energy Star standards for PCs and laptops. (Of course, the law applies to all other types of appliances that earn Energy Star ratings, including air-conditioning units, lighting, and the refrigerators and televisions that might show up Erie County government building’s break rooms.)

It’s difficult to keep a tab on what individual cities and counties are doing, but if you happen to live in one that’s passed similar laws, please drop me a line and let me know (or comment below).

Filed under: Fujitsu, Hydrogen fuel cells

While solar power has become the poster child of alternative energy for many a tech company (not to mention hydroelectric and others), Fujitsu has adopted a different technology for powering its Sunnyvale, Calif. facility: hydrogen.

Last Friday, Fujitsu became the first high-tech company in California to boast its own hydrogen power plant that, according to the company, provides clean, efficient power for the campus data center and other operations.

The fuel cell will generate 200 kilowatts of clean energy while surplus heat from the fuel cell will be captured to provide hot water for the facility.

Fujitsu reports that the hydrogen fuel cell “will provide 50 percent of the power needed to cool the Fujitsu Sunnyvale campus datacenter and labs.”

“With a payback of about three and a half years and a lifespan of about 15 years, hydrogen power is an excellent investment for the company,” says Tetsuo Urano, head of operations at Fujitsu America.

The hydrogen fuel cell installed on the Fujitsu Sunnyvale campus is the UTC Power PureCell Model 200 system. According to UTC, a power plant typically releases 67% of energy from fuel as waste heat, and the remaining 33% as electricity. By comparison, its fuel cell technology wastes on 20% of its energy; the remain 80% becomes electricity.

The fuel cell meets the most stringent air emissions standards as set by the California Air Resources Board. Although it is powered by natural gas, it produces 35 percent less CO2 per megawatt-hour than the average fossil fuel-based power plant, and approximately 4,000 lbs per year less NOx, the equivalent of taking more than 100 average passenger cars off the road, according to Fujitsu. Compared to conventional power plants, a Power PureCell system will save at least 800,000 gallons of water per year.

Fujitsu, as well as PG&E, used the fuel-cell installation as an opportunity to celebrate its other eco-friendly achievements. According to PG&E, the company’s various energy-effiency efforts have “saved over 3,300,000 kilowatt hours of electricity and 4,000 therms of natural gas annually, while reducing their overall electric demand for their Sunnyvale campus by 350 kW. Fujitsu Americas efforts have effectively prevented approximately 1.8 million tons of carbon dioxide from being released into the atmosphere each year.”

Filed under: Networking

Through evolving hardware and standards, as well as its broad datacenter reach, the network is becoming a green beneficiary and catalyst

The network isn’t immune to the greening effect that’s touched the enterprise IT infrastructure. On a granular level, the IT industry is seeing increased energy-efficiency touching network hardware such as routers and switches. But on a broader level, there’s potential for the network to be a vehicle of energy efficiency effort, an idea pushed by companies such as Cisco. And the brewing IEEE 802.3az standard, more elegantly known as the Energy Efficient Ethernet, could have a profound impact on reducing power consumption, too.

Let’s start with routers, one in particular. If you read the Test Center Daily, you may already be familiar with the Anagran FR-1000, brainchild of Dr. Lawrence Roberts. (He’s fathered some other impressive brainkids, including that sensational series of tubes we call the Internet.)

Designed to handle the new breeds of rich data that traverse network pipes — audio, video, and VoIP, for example — the Anagran FR-1000 doesn’t look at data on a packet-by-packet basis; it looks at entire flows of data. That approach, combined with other smarts, means the router requires 80 percent less energy, with saves on power bills. It’s also 80 percent smaller than other Layer-3 routers, according to the company, which can free up precious datacenter space.

Moving on to switches: Brocade is taking a page from server and PC hardware vendors in touting the relative energy efficiency of its switch lines. In particular, the company is boasting that its models deliver lower power consumption compared to the competition, but the company specifically calls out Cisco MDS 9513.

Citing a report compiled by ESG Labs [PDF], Brocade proclaims that its directors “have the lowest documented power draw at only 915 watts for 256 4Gbps ports and 1,150 watts for 384 4Gbps ports. They require less power per port (under 4 watts per port) and less power per unit bandwidth than any other vendor.”

The company also says, for example, that its Brocade 48000 “gets more done with less power” and that, “compared to competitive directors, they generate only a third of the heat, require less cooling and leave more power for other devices in a rack configuration.”

And in regard to Cisco: “With the energy it takes to run an MDS 9513, you can run a Brocade 48000 and power a large American home.”

The secret special green sauce to its switches, according to Brocade principal engineer Tom Clark, isn’t really that secret or special. He says the company has carefully selected the components, such as 85 percent efficient power supplies and more power-efficient NICs. “When you start with a less-efficient design, you end up with a box that consumes substantially more energy,” he said.

The switches also employ front-to-back airflow, so the boxes can be easily racked in a datacenter that employs hot and cold aisles — a fairly standard practice.

Cisco, however, hasn’t overtly taken the bait that Brocade has set down. For one thing, the company has a policy of not talking specifically about the competition (though Cisco notes it does employ 90 percent efficient power supplies in its products).

But perhaps more important, Rob Aldrich, Cisco’s senior manager of Cisco’s datacenter solutions marketing group, echoed a sentiment that’s raised time and again in the context of measuring energy consumption and efficiency for servers: Essentially, measuring power consumption doesn’t have much meaning unless you’re taking into account the work that the hardware is doing; that is, the service it’s delivering.

“Measuring what sort of power per port a switch or router requires is a good indication of how to plan for power capacity,” Aldrich said. “But if you take power per port to measure efficiency, you’re missing an important element: power per port to do what? What does a particular footprint get you in terms of service?”

That’s why organizations like The Green Grid (of which Brocade and Cisco are both members), Energy Star, as well as analysts such as InfoWorld’s own Tom Yager, are grappling with meaningful “green” benchmarks.

Cisco, which has been quietly studying energy efficiency in the datacenter over the past year, views the position of the network as being “unique among the IT infrastructure segments,” a notion it outlines in a white paper it recently published titled “Cisco Energy Efficient Data Center Solutions and Best Practices” [PDF].

In it, Cisco advises planners not to view the network in a piece-meal fashion but rather, “where possible planners should look to extend the touch of the network to gather as many relevant data sources as possible to monitor power efficiency. These sources include monitoring of power, temperature, and humidity… .”

The paper continues: “If an organization is serious about stabilizing or reducing emissions growth through the strategic application of IT, then it must consider all technologies. In the case of the network, given its ability to touch anything that consumes power, fixed or mobile, by definition it will identify more points of optimization than any other system.”

While companies such as Anagran, Brocade, and Cisco are demonstrating technologies and practices to wring the most energy efficiency out of the network, a forthcoming standard under development by the IEEE could have a significant green impact down the road.

IEEE Standard 802.3az, dubbed the Energy Efficient Ethernet, would enable network-connected hardware to throttle up and down between 10Mbps, 100Mbps, and 1Gbps, depending on the systems’ needs at any given time. Lower speed, of course, means connected systems aren’t working as hard, which in turn means lower energy consumption. (InfoWorld sister publication NetworkWorld has a good piece with more details about the EEE right here.)

According to Bruce Nordman, a researcher in the Energy Analysis Department at the Lawrence Berkeley Labs, Ethernet links are already capable of operating at lower speeds. The tricky bit is devising a way for the shift to happen quickly — as in within 10 milliseconds — to maintain connectivity.

The EEE could save $450 million in energy costs a year in the U.S. alone, according to researchers. Interestingly, the brunt of the savings — $200 million — could come from home computers, another $170 million from offices and $80 million from datacenters.

Filed under: Chips, Cooling, Future technology, Intel

Researchers at Purdue University have demonstrated a new technology that employs “ionic wind engines” to cool chips as much as five times more effectively than other experimental cooling approaches, the institution reports.

In their testing, researchers found that the technology reduced heating from about 140 degrees Fahrenheit to about 95. This kind of cooling technology could help hardware makers develop thinner, more powerful laptops, according to Purdue. (I imagine it could also show up in server hardware.)

“In computers and electronics, power equals heat, so we need to find ways to manage the heat generated in more powerful laptops and handheld computers,” said Timothy Fisher, associate professor of mechanical engineering at Purdue.

According to Purdue, the cooling technology could appear in computers in the next three years — if researchers are able to reduce the size of components within the device from the scale of millimeters to microns, or millionths of a meter. They’ll also have to figure out how to make the system sufficiently rugged.

“As things get smaller, they get more delicate, so we need to strengthen all the elements. And we believe we can achieve this goal in a year or so,” said Suresh Garimella, a professor of mechanical engineering at Purdue.

Down the road, it could also show up in portable devices such as cell phones.

The technology uses tiny “ionic wind engines” to achieve its supercool chilling effect. Here’s how Purdue explains it: The device contains a positively charged wire, or anode, and negatively charged electrodes, called cathodes. When voltage passes through the device, the negatively charged electrodes discharge electrons toward the positively charged anode. Along the way, the electrons collide with air molecules, producing positively charged ions, which were then attracted back toward the negatively charged electrodes. This creates the “ionic wind,” which increases the airflow on the surface of the experimental chip.

The research, funded by Intel, was conducted and documented in a paper by Fisher, Garimella, mechanical engineering doctoral student David Go, and Intel research engineer Rajiv Mongia. Specifics about the research will appear in the Journal of Applied Physics, tentatively scheduled for the Sept. 1 issue.

Filed under: Energy conservation

Tucked away on pages 54 and 55 of the EPA’s recently released report on server and datacenter efficiency is a rather impressive and comprehensive list of strategies for reducing energy costs in your datacenter facilities.

While many action items are certainly not as simple as, say, adjusting the thermostat a bit or plugging holes in the datacenter floor, it would behoove any datacenter operator to run down the list and at least do some research on those items that seem feasible or at least worth contemplating.

One of the more intriguing proposals, to me, is at the top of the list: “Design software to avoid excess code and inefficiencies.” The topic of software in the context of energy efficiency is one that I hope to explore in the near future. I can’t help put wonder if it contributes to the increasing interest that we’re seeing in Linux in the datacenter.

Following is the list of “Potential Energy-Efficiency Improvement Opportunities for Servers and Data Centers” as outlined by the EPA. (I’ve sprinkled in some links to InfoWorld coverage for some of the topics.)

1. Design software to avoid excess code and inefficiencies (treat CPU cycles as a finite resource)

2. Provide developer tools to help improve efficiency of software

3. Enable shifting of computational load among systems for maximizing energy efficiency

4. Upgrade applications no longer supported on latest technology and/or operating systems, allowing removal of legacy servers

5. Implement virtualization to allow consolidation of server and storage hardware

Operational Improvements

1. Turn off (ideally remove) dead, obsolete, or excess equipment

2. Turn off or power-manage equipment that won’t be used for extended periods of time (e.g., development systems not in active use, systems for future expected increases in activity, etc.)

3. Enable power-management features on existing equipment (e.g., frequency voltage scaling)

4. Maximize utilization of storage capacity through shared data storage, data compression, and data de-duplication

Design improvements

1. Accept high-efficiency power supplies over full operating range (including DC-DC conversions) or directly accept moderate DC voltage

2. Digitally control power supplies to better match output to load

3. Use high-efficiency variable speed fans (within IT equipment)

4. Reduce energy use at lower utilizations (whether the resource is processing capacity, memory, communications, or etc.). Applies to individual systems and to clusters.

5. Improve microprocessors to lower leakage current, increase system integration, etc.

6. Use storage virtualization and massive array of idle disks (MAID) technologies to allow storage power management

7. Use centralized servers (large systems) to improve sharing of computer resources

8. Improve hardware support for virtualization

9. Use built-in power monitoring

1. Use high-efficiency power distribution (i.e., higher-voltage AC or moderate-voltage DC (50-600 VDC))

2. Use premium-efficiency motors in fans and pumps

3. Use high-efficiency UPS units over full range of load

4. Use rotary-based UPS units

5. Right size power distribution and conversion to optimize efficiency

6. Use on-site generation with grid as back-up

1. Improve airflow management (i.e., use hot/cold aisle configuration or penetration sealing)

2. Adjust environmental conditions (temperature and humidity set points) to allow wider range while still meeting manufacturer specifications

3. Optimize data center airflow configuration using visualization tools (computational fluid dynamics modeling or infrared tomography)

4. Use high-efficiency variable-speed air-handler fans and chilled water pumps

5. Use variable-speed chillers

6. Use variable-speed, primary-only chilled water pumping

7. Use high-efficiency chiller and chilled water supply motors

8. Use high-efficiency CRAC units

9. Use air-side economizers (outdoor air) when outdoor conditions permit (preferably in mild climate locations)

10. Use water-side economizers (cooling tower) when outdoor conditions permit (preferably in mild climate locations)

11. Commission infrastructure systems to ensure set points are at proper values, sensors are in calibration, airflow is within design tolerances, etc.

12. Rebalance air-handler system after significant IT reconfiguration

13. Size systems and configure redundancy to maximize efficiency e.g., use redundant air-handler capacity in normal

14. Increase chilled water supply and return temperature difference to reduce chilled water flow

15. Optimize chilled water plant (cooling tower) Reuse waste heat for space heating

16. Use direct liquid cooling (water or other dielectric liquid) with currently available technology (i.e., in-rack or in-row cooling) and emerging technology (i.e., in-chassis or chip-level)

1. Use system management hardware/software that enables powering down (to sleep and/or off) parts of server clusters during times of low utilization

2. Dispatch non-time-sensitive computational operations to reduce peak computing load and allow reduction of total

3. Provide for standard reporting of power use, platform temperature, and processor utilizations to assist operators in understanding and managing energy use in their data centers

4. Use shared computing models, such as grid computing

5. Optimize cooling controls to dynamically match the cooling supply to the IT heat load

6. Dynamically optimize the assignment of work across the data center to ensure maximum efficiency

7. Monitor power in real time

1. Use combined heat and power

2. Use renewable energy (e.g., photovoltaic panels)

3. Use fuel cells

Filed under: Green Grid

Contrary to Gartner’s opinion, The Green Grid should concentrate on datacenter efficiency rather than dabbling in politics

More than a year ago, a handful of high-tech companies sowed the seeds for the Green Grid, a group they envisioned would work toward developing industry-wide best practices, metrics, and technologies for improving datacenter energy efficiencies.

The idea took root, and last February, the fledgling organization broke through the soil into the public light.

Since that time, it has blossomed impressively, boasting more than 80 members ranging from hardware and software companies such as Intel, AMD, and Microsoft, to telecoms such as BT, to public utilities, including PG&E.

The organization has borne some tangible fruit, including three white papers on topics such as preliminary, high-level benchmarks as well as broad best practices. And just this week, it outlined for the public a rather ambitious road map for delivering a bounty of studies to aid datacenter operators in wringing the most performance out of their facilities while using the least amount of energy possible.

But as critically observed by Gartner in a recent report, the Green Grid has demonstrated no plans to overtly tackle broader environmental issues beyond the datacenter — reducing e-waste, for example — through means such as political lobbying.

Gartner presented its criticism of the Green Grid in a paper titled “The Green Grid: A Paler Shade of Green.” While the paper is, in some ways, supportive of the Green Grid’s efforts, the authors of the paper start off with this sentence:

“The charter of the Green Grid extends beyond power and cooling strategies to include dealing with broad environmental issues. However, much of the initial focus misses the greater opportunity to influence legislation and behavior for broader green issues.”

Nowhere on the Green Grid’s Web site do I see mention that one of its goals is to address “broader environmental issues,” and it’s certainly never come up in my various interactions with members of the group. Still, its members do acknowledge that there is, indeed, a plethora of IT-related environmental issues to address. However, the group is determined to remain focused on its primary objective: energy efficiency in the datacenter.

“In the green space, energy is the 800-pound gorilla. It translates directly to economic savings and greenhouse gas savings. Not that there are other important issues, but if you’re looking at what to attack first, go to energy efficiency first,” says Mark Monroe, a Green Grid board member who represents Sun.

Focusing on that issue is critical to getting the job done, asserts Jim Pappas, Intel’s representative on the Green Grid board, who has worked on many successful groups to develop industry standards. “I understand Gartner’s position. I don’t necessarily agree with it,” he says. “We’re trying to keep our focus on solving tangible problems and making a difference that way. [That leads to] a much quicker path to demonstrable advancement in the industry.”

The Green Grid’s goals are very ambitious, and the fruits of its labor are extremely important for IT organizations and tech-reliant companies throughout the United States and beyond as they struggle with keeping energy costs down and datacenters humming. For Gartner to dismiss the group’s focus, as it does in the report, as “simply power efficiency in the datacenter” is to demonstrate, in my view, a serious lack of understanding of and appreciation for just how serious the issue of energy efficiency is for companies, how complex the datacenter environment is, and how tricky it is to establish useful and meaningful green standards and benchmarks.

I certainly am not arguing that the consortium shouldn’t have any interaction with the government; it does. For example, the Green Grid provided technical feedback to the EPA for its recently released study on server and datacenter efficiency.

But providing technical feedback is where the Green Grid wants to draw the line, notes Monroe. “The Green Grid wants to be viewed as a technical resource for the IT industry and people working on legislation. We’re not going to be a lobbying organization, but rather a technical resource for those folks,” he says.

As much as I respect Gartner, I have to agree that members of the Green Grid ought not don a PAC-like cap. There are other tech-oriented organizations out there that are pushing for eco-oriented legislation — and there are some Green Grid members in their ranks.

But if the Green Grid is to effectively pursue its ambition of being an independent body for developing vendor-neutral recommendations on best practices, metrics, and technologies for all datacenter operators, the last thing it needs is to let itself be distracted — or potential members and supporters to be put off — by its dabbling in politics.

Filed under: Green Grid

The Green Grid has remained fairly quiet over the past couple of months, save for the occasional announcement of a new member. But judging by the roadmap the group unveiled yesterday, it’s safe to say that the consortium has been quite busy indeed.

In a Webcast presentation, members of The Green Grid outlined an ambitious timeline for delivering a number of studies and other deliverables that should prove useful for datacenter operators looking to get a handle in bringing money-saving data efficiency into the datacenter.

Notably, it’s not clear yet which of these studies, or how much of their content, will be available to the public at large versus just to paid members of The Green Grid. Per my discussion with boardmembers yesterday, that’s still up in the air. General membership costs $5,000 per year.

Following is the roadmap, as outlined (more or less verbatim) by The Green Grid:

Data Collection

* Datacenter Standards and Metrics Inventory (Q3 of ‘07) - This study will document existing standards and metrics for energy efficiency, identify coverage gaps, and make recommendations for future development.

* The Green Grid Metrics: Describing Datacenter Power Efficiency (Q3 of ‘07) - This study will be an update to The Green Grid’s existing study on datacenter efficiency metrics and will look at workload classification through a data center segmentation model.

* Operationalizing Energy-Efficiency Data Collection (Q4 of 2007) - This study will identify the requirements for collecting and aggregating datacenter power consumption data.

* Datacenter Efficiency Baseline Market Study (Q3 of 2007) - This study on the current state of the industry will allow The Green Grid to identify key factors driving companies to take action on data center power consumption and the challenges in doing so. Collecting and analyzing this data will help to provide companies with a baseline to compare their own initiatives, goals and performance.

* Operational Best Practices (Q4 of 2007) - These studies will focus on right-sizing the datacenter and will outline best practices in the adoption of virtualization and consolidation technologies.

* Database for Datacenter Performance (Q4 of 2007) - The Green Grid will begin development work on a database focused on data center characteristics and performance schema.

Technology Proposals

* Initial Technology Roadmap (Q4 of 2007) - This roadmap provides an initial assessment of existing and emerging technologies affecting data center efficiency and performance, taking into consideration both return on investment and risk to the end-user.

* Power Distribution Options for the Datacenter Study (Q3 of 2007) - This study will look at the qualitative advantages and disadvantages of datacenter power distribution configurations.

* Cooling Options Study (Q4 of 2007) - This study will focus on the qualitative advantages and disadvantages of data center cooling architectures.

Filed under: AMD, Energy conservation, Green technology, Intel, Processors

In a follow-up gauntlet of tests pitting Intel Xeon processors against AMD Opterons, independent research company Neal Nelson and Associates found the Opteron generally — but not always — delivers superior raw energy efficiency. Interestingly, server memory proved a key factor.

Nelson tested the Opteron against the Xeon last month and determined AMD to be, hands down, the more power-efficient chip. His tests and results sparked plenty of discussion, including in my blog, prompting him to perform follow-up tests.

The most significant difference between this and the previous test is that he used an Opteron 2222 CPU rather than the 8222. He stuck with the Xeon 5160. In his tests, he once again compared the energy efficiency of a couple of similarly equipped servers, both configured with 4GB and 8GB of memory, as they processed Web transactions at a variety of load levels.

When machines were configured with 4GB of main memory, the Intel Xeon-based server proved between 1.4 and 5.1 percent more efficient. However, at 8GB, the Opteron server was between 6.1 and 12.7 percent more power efficient.

“It appears that when Intel chips are installed in Intel motherboards and sold as Intel servers, the Intel claim of superior power efficiency is not supported by the empirical data,” said Nelson in a written statement.

Notably, the AMD server equipped with 4GB of memory proved 33.3 percent more power-efficient in idle than the Intel; with 8GB, it was 43.4 percent more so.

Power consumption is relevant in idle mode, Nelson notes in a release about this round of tests, “since many servers spend most of their time waiting for work.” He cites Robert Frances Group’s finding that the average utilization of most processors in a datacenter is between 15 and 20 percent.

In the previous test, the AMD-based server consumed 7.3 to 15.2 percent less power at five different user load levels and 44.1 percent less power while the systems were idle and waiting for work, Nelson reported.

Nelson used the same testing benchmarks in this test as he did in the previous one: He processed a series of Web transactions on both servers, which were running Suse Linux Enterprise Server from Novell, Apache2 Web server software, and MySQL relational database.

However, in this series of tests, he used an Opteron 2222 instead of the 8222 as in the previous matchup. “AMD offers a ‘2 socket’ version of the Opteron as a model 2222. It has the same cache and frequency specifications as the model 8222, but the 2222 is limited to motherboards with a maximum of 2 sockets, and it is less expensive than the model 8222,” according to Nelson’s test report.

The performance differences between the two were negligible; generally, the 8222 was around 1.5 percent more efficient than the 2222.

In terms of cost, Nelson estimates that the 8GB configuration of the Xeon server would sell for about $4,651; the Opteron system would cost approximately $4,252. With 4GB of memory, the Xeon machine costs around $4,277 and the Opteron, $3,961.

For more information or to download a copy of the white paper outlining the test and results, go to worlds-fastest.com.

Filed under: Energy conservation

Through clearly communicated policies, companies can sway eco-conscious workers to reduce costly waste at the office

73 percent of American workers would like to see their companies be more environmentally and socially responsible, but many aren’t embracing energy-conservation practices in the office to the degree they do at home.

That’s one of the take-aways from a poll recently commissioned by Harris Interactive and sponsored by Sun. Among examples of inconsistent behaviors exhibited by employees:

- 92 percent of participants said they turn of their lights at home, whereas only 52 percent of workers turn off the light when they leave a room at work.

- 58 percent said they turn off computers at home when they are done using them, whereas only 34 percent does so at work.

- 57 percent of workers are using sleep mode for their home computers, but only 44 percent do so at work.

All that adds up to a lot of waste for your company. As I’ve noted before, the costs alone of leaving computers on 24/7 can rack up — as much at $75 in waste electricity per PC and monitor, per year, according to Energy Star.

And, of course, there’s the environmental impact to that wasted energy. According to Sun, “if the percentage of America’s 81.1 million office workers who are not turning off lights and computers at work took their energy-conscious behaviors to work with them, those workers could achieve the equivalent of taking 6.1 million cars off the road in aggregate CO2 emissions.”

The problem is pretty clear, and there are some good solutions, too. Dave Douglas, Sun’s VP of eco-responsibility, suggests that companies communicate to employees ways to be better environmental stewards at the office.

“If you’re an employee, these survey results show that you have an enormous opportunity to make a difference for our planet and to help America’s business make better use of their economic resources,” Douglas said in a written statement. “If you’re an employer, bridge this gap by communicating about the issue and how everyone can benefit by taking small steps. The good news is that your employees care about the environment, but they may need your help in realizing how much they can actually make a difference.”

That strikes me as sound advice indeed. It’s entirely possible that employees don’t know whether or not they should be turning off their systems, perhaps thinking they need to be patched at night. Or, perhaps your company’s current policy is to leave systems on for just that reason — even though there are products on the market designed to wake up systems for that kind of maintenance, then put them back to sleep.

Whatever the reason for employees’ lapses, it certainly makes abundant sense to send out an all-company missive explaining how workers might save energy at work. Visual reminders, such as small signs over light switches saying “Please turn off the lights when you are done with the conference room” would also help.

On a similar note, companies might consider reminding employees of the costs of printer waste. Research suggests that each end-user wastes about $85 worth of printer paper and ink each year through unnecessary prints, such as spill-over pages containing a superfluous line of text or gridlines, according to GreenPrint. (There’s a great list of tips for reducing printer waste here at SeekingAlpha.)

And again, a small sign at the printer and copy station asking employees to only print and copy what they need would serve to put a dent in the pile of waste.