[74980] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: Energy consumption vs % utilization?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Alex Rubenstein)
Tue Oct 26 15:01:49 2004
Date: Tue, 26 Oct 2004 14:31:20 -0400 (Eastern Daylight Time)
From: Alex Rubenstein <alex@nac.net>
To: "Gregory (Grisha) Trubetskoy" <grisha@ispol.com>
Cc: nanog@merit.edu
In-Reply-To: <20041026133008.M1223@onyx.ispol.com>
Errors-To: owner-nanog-outgoing@merit.edu
Hello,
I've done quite a bit of studyin power usage and such in datacenters over
the last year or so.
> I'm looking for information on energy consumption vs percent utilization. In
> other words if your datacenter consumes 720 MWh per month, yet on average
> your servers are 98% underutilized, you are wasting a lot of energy (a hot
> topic these days). Does anyone here have any real data on this?
I've never done a study on power used vs. CPU utilization, but my guess is
that the heat generated from a PC remains fairly constant -- in the grand
scheme of things -- no matter what your utilization is.
I say this, because, with a CPU being idle of 100% utilized, they still
are grossly inefficient, on the order of less than 10% in all cases (ie, 1
watt in returns at least .9 watts of heat, no matter loading of the CPU).
-- Alex Rubenstein, AR97, K2AHR, alex@nac.net, latency, Al Reuben --
-- Net Access Corporation, 800-NET-ME-36, http://www.nac.net --
