[74987] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: Energy consumption vs % utilization?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Petri Helenius)
Tue Oct 26 16:21:28 2004
Date: Tue, 26 Oct 2004 23:19:06 +0300
From: Petri Helenius <pete@he.iki.fi>
To: Alex Rubenstein <alex@nac.net>
Cc: "Gregory (Grisha) Trubetskoy" <grisha@ispol.com>, nanog@merit.edu
In-Reply-To: <Pine.WNT.4.61.0410261429110.3340@vanadium.hq.nac.net>
Errors-To: owner-nanog-outgoing@merit.edu
Alex Rubenstein wrote:
>
>> 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.
You should be able to pick up simple current / wattage meter from local
hardware store for $20 or so. That will tell you that on a modern
dual-CPU machine the power consumption at idle CPU is about 60% of peak.
The rest is consumed by drives, fans, RAM, etc. As wattage the
difference is 100-120W (50-60W per cpu)
All modern operating systems do moderate job of saving CPU wattage when
they are idle (BSD's, Linux, MACOS X, WinXP, etc.)
Pete
