Idle servers are the devil's watt guzzlers
Wednesday Jun 04, 2008
Servers are very different than laptops, DUH! Therefore one must benchmark power in a very different way. We all know that laptops spend lots of time at low utilisation or idle (waiting for your input). Most servers should not be used at idle or anywhere near idle. Kick out any vendor that only wants to show watt savings at low utilisation, they are trying to get you to take your eye of the real truth.
In the good ol' wasteful days of yore, you could have your servers running at 20%, drive your huge SUV alone down the block to pick up buy an incandescent bulbs.
Today, you need to lower your costs and carbon footprint by turning off wasteful low-utilised servers, buying efficient servers and running them in at least an efficient part of the power curve, say 50-60% util or more.
Demand that every vendor add power measurement to every benchmark right now! I fear many are redesigning benchmarks to add power only to emphasize low utilisation. In my opinion (I speak for myself not necessarily Sun), low utilisation measurements are just smoke and mirrors and disinformation. As I pointed out last week you can save many times more watts per unit of work by just raising your utilisation a bit.
Why do I mention this which appears obvious...
This morning I had breakfast with a friend. Always enjoyable catching up with friends. He mentioned that a customer of his wanted to make buying power decisions "based on the idle watts of a server"!?! The customer was prompted to ask that by a vendor. After a realistic conversation continued the customer now feels completely mislead by the other vendor.
Now off to a tasty lunch...
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