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Recent Posts by Andrew Binstock
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In June and August of last year, I wrote a pair of columns in which I extolled the value of virtualization as a solution to excessive energy consumption. The primary benefit, as I described it, is that virtualization makes it possible to consolidate multiple applications onto a single server. That is, apps that currently run on dedicated systems can be moved en masse to a single server that consumes less power -- generally, far less power -- than that required by the dedicated servers.
This economy derives from two principal factors:
1) Modern servers are much more energy-efficient than their forbears. This is true in absolute terms and relative terms. In fact, in relative terms, such as watts per mips, today's systems are orders of magnitude more efficient.
2)
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Until very recently, the need for IT to really include eco-concerns as part of overall strategy did not have universal appeal. Surely, sites located in areas such as southern Manhattan where power distribution is already running at maximum capacity have a grave problem. And likewise sites that need more room but have tight expansion constraints. For them, green has been a key preoccupation for a while.
For most other IT sites, however, the main driver for green has been cost reduction -- and until the last few months, the cost of energy was tolerable even if somewhat higher than budgeted. So, pressure existed to reduce unnecessary consumption, but not place the issue at the center of IT concerns. However, with oil now regularly surpassing $130 per barrel, there is no longer any
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The golf expression "It's the rub of the green" means the equivalent of "them's the breaks." It refers to the fact that you're going to have your share of good luck and bad luck when your ball is on the green. Every so often you'll hit a divot or other irregularity -- and sometimes the results will be good, other times not so much. It's the rub of the green. Today, I want to refer to the expression in a rather different sense: when green rubs people and IT the wrong way. The world today is so prone to over-marketing, so accustomed to rapid cycles of surging popularity followed by a precipitous descent into oblivion that, at times it feels like the only sane way to deal with new trends is to tune them out. This applies even to green. Let's not forget that the
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In this column, I have previously examined energy-saving options on processors and hard disks. This time around, I'd like to examine one of the other principal energy sinks on the standard PC: graphics cards. Graphics cards are a confusing area of technology because almost all the attention and press the cards receive is dedicated to the high-end, super-expensive cards favored by gamers and hardware aficionados. Those users live and die by the next release of whiz-bang features and the number of anti-aliased triangles that can be displayed.
But if you're choosing graphics capabilities for a business system, the likelihood that anti-aliased triangles are important to your choice is close to nil. And that means that you'll be able to save energy, because generally, the more
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Early this month, I attended the Technical Forum of the Green Grid vendor consortium. The Green Grid is a recently formed group that brings together major businesses to establish useful tools and policies for eco-responsibility in IT shops. Its activities include defining metrics for the IT industry, establishing best practices, and encouraging adoption of both.
The two-day forum was narrowly focused on the quest for useful, usable metrics that measure energy efficiency in data centers. While many members of the technical committee have been working on this problem long before Green Grid existed, I was surprised by how little consensus there was on how to measure energy efficiency and how crude the proposed measures currently are. This observation does not in any way denigrate
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The Difficulty of Gauging Workstation Power Consumption -- and How to Get it Done
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While SPEC cannot and does not vouch for those results, the industry puts real effort into maintaining the integrity of posted results. And because those results often figure prominently in marketing campaigns and reports by market analysts, competitors track each others' numbers carefully, which provides an additional incentive for fair, accurate reporting.
The SPEC benchmarks are almost always suites of tests that exercise the key features of a hardware or software component. A good example is the SPEC ViewPerf benchmark that I discussed in my previous column. It measures the performance of graphics subsystems on PCs and workstations by running through a series of visual tests. As I mention in that column, ViewPerf can be downloaded from SPEC and run to generate a series of results that enable comparison between two graphics cards.
Returning to power consumption, the issue faced in designing benchmarks is how to create a realistic suite that generates numbers that accurately reflect the quantity being measured. For example, how to reflect power consumption of the "typical" use model for a PC, workstation, or server?
For servers, SPEC formulated an interesting response to this question when it designed the SPECpower_ssj2008 benchmark suite. Because there are so many different kinds of servers, a universal profile would have been very difficult to develop. (Consider, for example, the different usage levels for a Web server than, say, an authentication server -- the latter being used exclusively to check user logons and passwords.) SPEC chose a Java application running on the server.
The software generates results for the server under workloads starting from 0 percent load (no activity) rising to 100 percent load in 10 percent increments. The benchmark tracks the number of operations performed at each workload level and the power consumed. The average of test operations per watt consumed at each power level is the ultimate benchmark figure. Figure 1 shows this data for a Dell PowerEdge 1950 III server (with dual Intel Xeon E5440 processors).
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A key point in this calculation is that by taking the average of the numbers at 11 levels of work load, SPEC modeled servers as spending equal time at each level. This activity profile probably matches no single server, but is a reasonable model for measuring all servers.
Now, if we look at workstations, the model to use to get a representative number is considerably more elusive. Workstations are generally associated with two kinds of special activities: number crunching and high-end graphics. In addition, workstations generally have more disk drives than comparable PCs. The difficulty in factoring all these elements together can be seen in other benchmarks that try to capture workstation consumption levels. For example, the recently released Energy Star v. 4 specification of Requirement For Computers (http://www.energystar.gov/ia/partners/product_specs/program_reqs/Compute...) has straightforward power-consumption measures for PCs and even servers, but it relies on multivariable formulas when it comes to workstations. To qualify for the EnergyStar certification, a workstation's average power draw must be less than or equal to:
where Pmax is the maximum power the workstation can consume and HDD is the number of hard disk drives. Coincidentally enough, the Pmax figure can be generated (according to the EPA) by running the SPEC ViewPerf benchmark mentioned earlier plus the Linpack benchmark (found at http://www.netlib.org/linpack/). The problem with Linpack is that it's a Fortran benchmark and if you can't compile Fortran, you can't run it. However, a Java version can be found here: http://www.netlib.org/benchmark/linpackjava And Java compilers are available from Sun for most platforms today.
Taken together, the formula and the two benchmarks enable you to measure the power consumption of your workstations (and, if you want, your high-end PCs). The only missing element is the meter to measure the watts consumed. As mentioned in previous columns, I recommend the Kill-A-Watt Electricity Usage Meter from P3 International, which is inexpensive (around $25) and easy to use.
Now, you can establish your own set of benchmarks for power consumption at your site without waiting for SPEC to complete its own benchmark suite.
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