Thursday, September 27, 2007 Ng: PC electricity consumption By Wilson Ng Wired Desktop
IN the past, when we consider buying computers, we never thought about how much electricity they use. This is primarily because electricity consumption is an expense that is not separately monitored. In all of the last 20 years that I talked to people about buying computers, electricity consumption was almost never discussed.
It was not significant - or we thought it was not significant. It was similar to five years ago when oil was only less than a third of the price now. People then knew that if they bought a Ford Expedition or any big SUV, they would be spending a lot on gasoline consumption but they didn’t think it was significant, or if they did, it was something they could afford.
In the last three years, with oil hovering at a $60 to $70 per-barrel range, and with computers getting more and more powerful, people suddenly started to take a second look at their electricity bills.
Apart from higher electricity rates, this concern came up because computers nowadays are much more powerful with processors that pack hundreds of millions of transistors. They probably eat up twice or three times as much electricity as computers 10 years ago.
But there is more — they also generate two or three times as much heat and as such need additional air-conditioning for cooling. This is why computers nowadays eat up four or five times more electricity than those in the past.
There was a time when you could just throw your servers in a corner and these would run. Now, if you have several servers running 24 hours, many of them would require cooling or 24 hours air-conditioning to continue functioning properly.
According to an IDC report, for every dollar that is spent these days to buy computer hardware, 50 cents are spent annually for energy to power and cool that hardware. And it gets even worse. As computers become more powerful, the report estimated that by 2011, every dollar spent on computer hardware will need a corresponding 71 cents for energy costs.
These statistics tell us one thing — we will spend more in powering and cooling these computers over three years than what we spent in buying these equipment.
According to another study, a 10,000-square foot data center can consume as much electricity as 8,000 pieces of 60-watt light bulbs. That is the amount of electricity that is equivalent to over a million dollars a year, and is probably six to 10 times the power needed to operate a typical office building.
There are new architectural designs developed to address this — in the same way that hybrid cars (those combining use of gas and electricity) are meant to solve rising oil prices.
Processor manufacturers are starting to focus on developing dual or multi-core processors as a way to increase the power of computers. They are also introducing more power-efficient models, like automatically powering the processors down when in idle mode.
Server manufacturers are also introducing new architectures like blade servers, which promise to reduce electricity consumption by as much as 20 percent to 30 percent through better design and are easier to cool.
Many manufacturers are starting to introduce hardware and software virtualization that allow people to consolidate tasks that hopefully would allow them to make more efficient use of fewer servers. The term virtualization is a big term nowadays, and you will be hearing much more about it in the coming days.
But what is important to us is to start evaluating our needs. A school MIS person was proud of the fact that his school uses about 50 servers (many of them four to 10 years old) and he was saving a lot for the school by continuing to use these old servers. What he did not compute was that it costs the school a fortune every month to power, cool and maintain those servers. Upon careful study, we found out that by using more powerful servers and virtualization, he can replace the 50 aging servers with five or less new ones.
Saving money has many faces and it is important that we understand technology so as not to be penny-wise and pound-foolish.
