I went to a very good lecture at my institute last night - here are some of the things that struck me;
- UK data-centres currently consume about 4% of the electricity generated in this country. This is set to rise to 7% by 2010 and then about one percent per year on current rates of growth.
- If you look at a kW-hour as generated and measure how much of that makes it to the processor you see that there are modest losses in transmission and sub-stations, but by the gates of the data-centre you still have 80%. However, once you've gone through distribution and (particularly) UPSes and then the mass-market PSUs that most servers still ship with you are down to about 10% of original power by the time you get to the motherboard.
- Virtualisation hasn't yet penetrated into UK data-centres as much as it should have - this is particularly important because the average server is typically consuming only 15% of processor cycles. I did write about VM Ware previously.
- Having spent time at VNSL's data-centre in Stratford a few days recently I've been thinking about efficiently those guys do cooling and power-distribution - see previous post here.
No comments:
Post a Comment