AMD 41% less power than Intel when you add Memory Power Consumption

Lewis Curtis from Microsoft forwarded on the tests run by Neal Nelson & Associates comparing AMD Opteron vs. Intel Xeon.

Recent tests by Neal Nelson, an independent computer performance expert, show that while some Quad-Core Intel Xeon based servers delivered up to 14 percent higher throughput, similarly configured Quad-Core AMD Opteron based servers consumed up to 41 percent less power. The test servers used 1 gigabyte memory modules at 4, 8 and 16 gigabyte main memory sizes.

"By themselves the Intel (NASDAQ: INTC) processor chips may use less power, but all current Intel Xeon servers require the use of Fully Buffered memory modules. These FB-memory modules appear to consume more power than the DDR-II memory modules used by the AMD (NYSE: AMD) based servers. The result is that in many cases an Opteron based server actually uses less total power than a Xeon based server." observed Neal Nelson, designer of the test.

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EMC adds Flash (SSD) to product line Energy Efficiency

EMC adds flash-based solid state drives to its products lines.  Energy efficiency performance is their main selling points.

 
   

Because there are no mechanical components in flash drives, they require less power. In a storage array, flash drives can store a terabyte of data using 38 percent less energy than traditional mechanical disk drives. It would take 30 15,000 RPM Fibre Channel disk drives to deliver the same performance as a single flash drive, which translates into a dramatic 98 percent reduction in power consumption in a transaction-per-second comparison.

   

“For years, magnetic disk drive technology has defined performance boundaries for customers’ mission critical storage environments,” said David Donatelli, President, EMC Storage Division. “With this announcement, EMC has again revolutionized the storage industry. The introduction of flash drive technology builds on EMC’s long history of storage industry firsts, including the pioneering use of small form factor disk drives and ATA disk drives in enterprise storage systems. Then as now, EMC is helping customers gain a competitive advantage and tackle information challenges that no other vendor’s technology can.”

 

It's great to see EMC market this feature. I've been talking to some storage architects who have been looking at flash for performance, and telling them the opportunity is huge in that not only is it fast, but it is energy efficient which is key for a green data center.  Changes in storage systems are going to see some of the biggest changes in energy efficiency for 2008 as the rest of the industry focuses on storage power consumption.

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Green Momentum article

NetworkWorld has a Green Momentum article.

There is no topic hotter than global warming. After all, Al Gore won the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for his work in raising awareness, his movie "An Inconvenient Truth" won an Oscar, and terms like "carbon footprint" are now part of the common lexicon. 

 

So is green just the buzzword of the day? Is it a fad? And what does all this have to do with IT?

 

Graph of how power and cooling costs have risen

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Waukesha, Wisconsin City Gov't goes Green in their Data Center

In Government Technology, Solutions for State and Local Government in the Information Age, Waukesha, Government is highlighted as an early mover in the green effort, and specifically calls out their Green Data Center Efforts.  This momentum resonates with conversations I've had with Microsoft's Gary Falis, Sr Director for Pubic Sector Sales who has called attention that local gov't are some of the earliest adopters of Green Technology.

A domino effect of local government green initiatives is sweeping the nation. The U.S. Conference of Mayors (USCM) recently announced that more than 700 mayors have signed the USCM's Climate Protection Agreement, committing to pursue numerous green measures. 

In Waukesha, Wis., however, a major green rollout was implemented before the pressure to conform started, and many local governments soon plan to do many of the things Waukesha has already completed.   

Data centers are typically a massive power drain for governments, making green data centers critical power savers. Waukesha deployed a more energy-efficient cooling system in its data center, which at roughly 680 square feet, is larger than the facilities in most nearby cities, said Bret Mantey, IT director of Waukesha.

"It compares to the county data center closely, but not as large as, say, Milwaukee. All other cities in the county are a broom closet in comparison," Mantey said. 

The city uses blade servers and server virtualization to reduce the number of servers it powers in the data center.

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IBM VC 2008 Green Datacenter Prediction

VentureBeat has an article by Drew Clark, Director of Strategy and co-founder of IBM's Venture Capital group. This is consistent with another presentation I saw from IBM on Green Technology.  Here are some of the key points.

Green Datacenter. The “greening” of the datacenter will continue to be a top priority for corporations as the cost of simply powering the center begins to exceed the cost of the servers and devices in it. Key drivers to help reduce the overall carbon footprint and run more efficient centers will include intelligent sensors and advanced analytics to monitor and improve equipment utilization to reduce downtime and provide comprehensive operational visibility. Green datacenters are also increasingly becoming part of corporate social responsibility campaigns, so expect increased focus here. 

Beyond investment in alternative energy, there will be a great demand for technologies that allow energy consumers (businesses and homeowners) and producers (utilities) to monitor, manage, distribute and use energy more efficiently. Look for more investment in companies in the areas of energy efficiency, advanced water management, intelligent utility networks, energy caching and storage, and demand-side conservation and smart metering tools.

Meanwhile, leading-edge companies are evaluating Web-based platforms that provide service-based access to a range of infrastructure services, information, applications, and business processes. As these Google-like “clouds” evolve and mature over the next 2-3 years, we’ll begin to see them strongly influence the next phase in enterprise datacenter architecture.

In addition, one of the greenest uses of data centers will be through mobile phones which have small resource usage are always on, connected to data center web services.

Industry analysts are predicting that by 2010 there will be 1 billion people (almost a third of the world’s population) accessing the Web via a mobile screen. This is obviously game-changing. The social-community-based approach of Web 2.0 will increasingly become part of this mobile landscape in 2008.

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