Thursday, April 24, 2008 Ng: Power consumption By Wilson Ng Wired Desktop
I AM in a conference right now on proper power management, as well as management of servers and data centers. The focus of the discussion is the high cost of power and cooling.
“Power in equals heat out.” This just goes to say that the more powerful the computers are, the more electricity it consumes; and just as much heat is produced in the process. This is the same way with cars: the more powerful the car’s engine, the more fuel it consumes and the more carbon it emits.
And the more heat the computer generates, the more one has to spend on cooling the equipment and the room.
As concern for carbon emissions mount, and with oil now nearing $120 per barrel (from about $20 five years ago), power consumption is of significant concern.
There is a reason—the latest Intel Pentium quad core processors may look small but they generate a lot of heat. After all, in that tiny chip there are 820 million transistors. Imagine the amount of power and heat these generate.
They say that an ordinary AM radio only has eight to 15 transistors. That means a chip technically has a hundred million times more sophistication, electricity and heat-generating capacity.
If one opens a computer box, one will find that the heat sink and fan that are used to cool the processor can be 10 or 20 times bigger than the chip itself! In fact, power and cooling costs are now overtaking IT hardware prices, and this is something that people need to take a look at.
If your company has a hundred computers, it may be paying over a hundred thousand pesos per month in electricity consumption alone, not only for powering the computers, but also to make sure the aircon-ditioning system is enough to cool the office.
This is a cost that is traditionally ignored. People focus on saving money by buying the cheapest computers but they get whacked with power bills. The same goes for servers and software. It is not unusual for people to balk at a P300,000-quality software package, but they don’t know that hiring five programmers to make and maintain their own systems can actually cost them half a million pesos per year.
I know some people who buy new cars before their existing vehicles get old and dilapidated. While they spend hundreds of thousands, even a million, they believe that maintaining an old car would be more costly in the end.
How many companies consider these factors when buying computers or software? That is why in the ICT industry, people now talk about TCO (total cost of ownership).
But few companies have realized this.
There are now many new technologies that address power and cooling issues. Thin client computing, virtualization and blade servers are the new technologies that allow for better power management.
I also just learned that one must not use ordinary airconditioning equipment for the data center, but specially designed precision aircondition.
Aircondition to cool computers use different technologies than those used for cooling people. Precision cooling, as they call it, uses special equipment to ensure that the cooling process does not create humidity and moisture in the power components. Humidity and moisture can corrode power components, a factor that one does not have to consider when setting up an airconditioning system for people.
