What happens downstream?: Scott Mattoon's blog

The Ziff Davis eSeminar today on Managing the Exploding Energy Costs in the Data Center was billed as an opportunity to learn "How to build the energy-smart datacenter". If you run an overheated, power hungry Dell and Intel datacenter this was an hour for you. The tools, technologies and services presented were specific to these platforms. The seminar was really a commercial for these brands.

It's great to see other industry leaders focused on this problem. It's not great to see Sun's truly game-changing technologies for energy efficiency so often absent from the discussion.

Innovation coming out of Dell for policy based shut down of systems at night was featured in the presentation. This is a valuable tool for the enterprise who has predictable workloads involving periods of non-use. Unfortunately, the businesses with the highest demand for compute resource are global operations that deliver their value online, so don't have the option of shutting down systems at night. (Desktops are generally good candidates for this efficiency measure, but the period of non-use for a 200 watt desktop would have to be more than 23 hours every day in order to use the same amount of energy as a 4 watt SunRay 2. Sign me up for the 5 hour work week.)

Dell made the requisite claim that their servers are optimized for power and deliver 25% greater performance per watt over similarly configured servers. They went on to compare with the HP DL 380 and the IBM x3650.

Intel discussed a lot of the long range promise for improving processor efficiency through advances like 45nm process and, and the potential for 10X reduction in power consumption for equivalent or better performance through the use of Indium Antimonide transistors. Their material included an intersting axiom that smaller silicon means lower power consumption. They didn't answer my question about how to reconcile that with the historical evidence to the contrary - as processors have gotten smaller their power consumption has risen.

Intel also took the opportunity to promote their Ultra-dense processor line which is the Xeon L53x0, their 40W Dual-Core, and 50W Quad-Core low voltage processors. The Quad-Core due is due to ship in the next few weeks. The quad-core is basically a dual die design that combines two of their dual-core wafer on one chip. The wattage spec. for these is interesting. Like other vendor specs, it does not include the power draw of the supporting chip set, but in the L5300 series, where they've moved the memory controller off of the processor, this means there's at least 30 watts not accounted for in the spec if you were looking for an apples to apples comparison.

The most valuable insight offered in the talk was a cost comparison of liquid vs. air cooling. David Moss from Dell said that in high density environments where air cooling has the worst efficienty, liquid is cheaper, at least in theory, than air.

Someone asked a great question about the state of the art in using waste heat from the datacenter to heat office space, and using free cooling from the ambient air outside to cool a datacenter. The answer, basically, was that people are talking about it, and it's not very practical in a place like Austin. It was disappointing that these experts really aren't thinking about the potential efficiency gains from such an industrial ecology approach. There are some practical applications of this already in use in Scandinavia. Other than Project Blackbox I'm not sure what Sun is doing in this area, but it seems like there is a big market opportunity here.

You can get the audio and slides from this and other eSeminars at www.eseminarslive.com