Better policy is critical for Eco, watts good? ...virtualize
Tuesday Aug 21, 2007
Truly being Eco is about looking at the right things and highlighting them in a way so you can make real judgments that really make a difference.
A fellow Sun employee gave me a great analogy, if you want to save power switch off the light! Obvious. But too often we try to use fancy technology to save energy when proper policy is more important.
If you leave incandescent lights on all day, switching to CFL (compact florescent lights = better technology) can save energy. but if you "switch it off during the daylight hours" (better policy) you can save a lot more.
How does this apply to datacenters? Everyone needs to change their policies to operate servers at not an insane 20-30% utilisation but to 50% or more.
There are all kinds of virtualisation technologies that can be used if for some reason you can't simply drive up the load. Take two servers at 25% and consolidate them on to one server running at 50% utilization and "turn the other one off".
There are lots of virtualisation technologies VMware, Xen, Solaris 10 Zones,... Another thing to consider is that Solaris 10 zones have no overhead for CPU, IO, and network. Overheads reduced performance but they also require one to burn more CPU watts. But use whatever technology suits your needs.
...more on using fancy datacenter power saving technology tomorrow...
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