Trimming watts with software by Doug Mohney

Views and Opinions on Green IT (Jul 20 2009) Monitoring , Grid Computing , Networking , Servers

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   Can a little software go a long way to trimming power consumption?  Packing more customers per server and rack is both cost effective and power efficient, but there are other tricks that larger firms are looking at to cut back on buying hardware and more bandwidth.

   The simplest solution has been used by penny-pinching Internet service providers way before Green became popular – virtual hosting.   Loading more people onto a single server delays the need to buy more hardware – and hence, adding to the power bills, along with various other networking and management expenses.

   Symantec brags about consolidating down hardware and data centers to an intense degree, by using a combination of clustering machines, storage tiering to avoid using high-performance equipment only when necessary and even data deduplication to avoid saving unnecessary versions of the same data to reduce data storage needs.

   In 2007, Symantec shut down two data centers, a small co-located one in the U.K. and its second largest data center in Sunnyvale, California, a 10,000 square foot facility.  The Sunnyvale data center was running 1,635 devices; Symantec pushed that count down to 352 devices, which were then redistributed to other facilities.  Among the downsizing were 15 storage arrays with 141 terabytes of physical storage – now that's a lot of hardware and power!

   Google has hinted at taking software optimization one step further by developing automated tools that manage data center heat load.  If a data center gets too hot, some of the compute load might be redistributed between data centers automatically, allowing for a shutdown of some CPUs and RAM.  Looking down the road, if such auto-switching can be made to work relatively seamlessly, workloads could just as easily be shifted to locations where power is the cheapest (and greenest).

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