BM Seer Unofficial thoughts from an anonymous Sun employee

Driving to higher utilization plus low wattage systems like T2000

Wednesday Nov 29, 2006

Don't be swayed too much by low-power saving technology hype. Don't look at "wattage vs. utilisation", you really need to look at "perf/watt vs. utilisation". Perf/watt must be completely constant over the utilisation curve if you think you can run a datacenter at 15% utilisation and save money.

Check out my last posting and look at the last graph to understand the issues.

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Posted at 10:17AM Nov 29, 2006 in Wattage-Power
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Save money relative to what? I haven't seen any claims that running at low utilization saves money compared to running at high utilization. I have seen claims that at constant utilization, power-saving techniques save money compared to not having power-saving techniques.

Posted by Wes Felter (IBM Research) on November 29, 2006 at 04:31 PM PST #

I'm still stuck with the problem of if you have old servers at 15% utilisation why do you buy new servers and have them at 15% utilisation and save money with power-throttling features, why not just run you old servers at slightly higher utilisation?

or better yet why don't you consolidate onto a low-power server and still run at higher utilisation.

Sure power-throttling can save, but likely there are better ways if you apply some thought.

Posted by BM Seer on November 30, 2006 at 03:11 PM PST #

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