Making Your Datacenter Into Less of a Rabid Zombie Power Hog 52
Nerval's Lobster writes "Despite the growing list of innovative (and sometimes expensive) adaptations designed to transform datacenters into slightly-less-active power gluttons, the most effective way to make datacenters more efficient is also the most obvious, according to researchers from Stanford, Berkeley and Northwestern. Using power-efficient hardware, turning power down (or off) when the systems aren't running at high loads, and making sure air-cooling systems are pointed at hot IT equipment—rather than in a random direction—can all do far more than fancier methods for cutting datacenter power, according to Jonathan Koomey, a Stanford researcher who has been instrumental in making power use a hot topic in IT. Many of the most-publicized advances in building "green" datacenters during the past five years have focused on efforts to buy datacenter power from sources that also have very low carbon footprints. But "green" energy buying didn't match the impact of two very basic, obvious things: the overall energy efficiency of the individual pieces of hardware installed in a datacenter, and the level of efficiency with which those systems were configured and managed, Koomey explained in a blog published in conjunction with his and his co-authors' paper on the subject in Nature Climate Change . (The full paper is behind a paywall but Koomey offered to distribute copies free to those contacting him via his personal blog.)"
Less powerconsumption = less cooling (Score:4, Interesting)
I've pointed this out a number of times. But people do not seem to "get it". If you can reduce your power consumption then there is less waste heat and then less cooling cost. Note too that if your applications use lots of disk reads/writes and network IO with the cpu in a waiting state then you can save power by using a lower end gear. E.g. laptop chips and slower memory vs full blown "Enterprise" hardware.
Re:Less powerconsumption = less cooling (Score:5, Interesting)