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March 27, 2007
Blade Servers & the Pontiac Laurentian Problem
On my ETech panel yesterday I argued that data centers have a Pontiac Laurentian problem. While new generations of semiconductors are becoming somewhat better about power consumption, which is a big deal given upward-spiraling power demands in the data center, companies are stuck with huge numbers of of heat-generating older blades, the equivalent of smog-grandfathered fleets of Pontiac Laurentians.It seems that I'm not the only who has noticed this problem, so has Wall Street:
[via Wall Street & Technology]
"There's a trade-off we're all having to make at the moment," notes
John van Uden, SVP, capital markets and banking technology at
Citigroup. "The faster the clock cycles go, the more heat they require
to be dissipated. The more heat they generate, the more cooling they
need, so they therefore start driving power usage up." If old computers
are left in the data centers, the number of machines necessary for HPC
multiplies quickly. Yet refreshing hardware frequently to follow the
HPC curve is expensive both from an equipment and a power-consumption
point of view.
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Another problem is that the costs of the low power systems is excessive even if you are comparing new hardware to new hardware. If you look at the premium that AMD charges for low voltage chips, you would have to be paying way over market rates for power (and I'm talking about top tier data center power that includes the associated air conditioning, UPS and generator backup) to justify the costs. With decent rates, the added expense of the high efficiency machines will never be paid back.
A lot of people are talking about mips / watt, but what you really want are mips / $, taking account of how much money you have to pay for electricity. Given that electricity is still very cheap, mips / $ favors inefficient hardware (though maybe not the computer equivalent of a Laurentian).
It's quite likely that the real problem is that the cost of electricity does not accurately reflect the environmental costs of its consumption. A classic tragedy of the commons. Iff electricity prices reflect the true cost of that power to society, large data center consumers will optimally upgrade their systems to more energy efficient versions. Until then, the old machines (and even the new, but inefficient ones) will remain in the racks.
Yes, the Laurentian was only sold in Canada. That was my little insider shout-out to all my homeys ... :-)
Er... wasn't the Pontiac Laurentian only sold under that name in Canada?