Reducing Energy Consumption Using Low Power Servers
Wednesday February 23, 2011
Energy efficiency has become more than a buzz word in the IT industry. With computers now an indispensable part of business, such an immense amount of energy consumed is a growing concern in a world where the trend is to move towards energy efficiency.
Fortunately, the IT industry is responding to the concerns and are developing and releasing low-power servers to assist with cutting energy consumption. Companies have reduced power consumption by significantly decreasing server components, aggregating power and fan supplies across multiple servers, and using low-power processors that have been traditionally used in mobile devices.
For instance, one of GigeNET’s most popular servers is the Intel Xeon-D. It’s optimized for both performance and energy consumption. The server was built in a partnership between Intel and Facebook and designed to be highly dense, while using less power and running cooler than other servers of that speed and performance.
Low-power processors are ideal for workloads that can be divided into a number of separate tasks that are executed independently which results in full utilization and thereby reduces energy waste. These servers have become very popular with hosting providers who want to provide their clients with a dedicated server at a lower cost. Proponents of low-power servers believe these servers will eventually be able to be used for specific tasks by large enterprise. For instance, large-scale data mining is one task that large enterprise will be able to use with lower-power servers.