back to the future with micro servers - by peter judge

Views and Opinions on Green IT (Mar 28 2011)

1. 

   Normally I am blissfully unaware of hosting decisions - but I think I may have to pay more attention.

   My day job is editing eWEEK Europe in the UK, and we have a  site which covers, among other things, efficient data centres, servers, hosting and things of that nature. The site is hosted, and over the course of the last couple of years, as traffic has grown, we have occasionally moved the server to a new place which - we hope - will deliver the traffic better.

   It may surprise you to know that I am not generally part of the decisions as to where we put the site.

   That’s for a couple of reasons. Firstly, I’m not the one who writes the checks (or cheques as we would say in the UK). Secondly, our head office is in France, and tech decisions get taken in France and Germany, as they affects the hosting of other titles in the group, in four different countries.

   So normally, I just get occasional updates on what sort of server we are using, how much performance it has and how robust it will be to the kind of peaks and surges in demand that any site hopes for and sometimes gets.

   Our last move was a surprise for me. It took us from a virtual server to a physical server. I thought virtualization was the way everything was going. I guess that serves me right for listening too closely to the marketing people I meet.

   It turns out, of course, that there is a move towards farms of smaller individual servers for particular jobs - Dell’s PowerEdge C5000 Micro Servers, for instance, which are based on AMD low-power chips, with an option to use Intel Xeons.

   As with all things, the actual use of this sort of server is not set in stone. As David Chernicoff points out at ZDnet, they do actually support virtualization but, as he says: “that sort of defeats the purpose; if you plan on running virtualized environments, you might want to consider more capable hardware.”

   In our case, we are not on one of these new micro-servers, but we have reached a stage where it makes sense to give one site a whole server of its own, with some leg room. Before the move, we sometimes faced a nice problem - some stories were so popular they overloaded the site and made it tough for us to edit and put up new ones.

   I don’t think energy usage formed a direct part of our decision where to go - our service providers don’t break out the electricity bill; they offer processor power, storage and bandwidth, for a price.

   But since power is a major cost for those service providers, I’m sure the energy efficiency of today’s servers is one of the main reasons they can offer us separate servers per website at a price we are willing to pay.

   So, we have a small step away from virtualisation, but it takes place within an overall move to greater energy efficiency - whether or not the IT director (my colleagues in France and Germany) or the end user (me, my colleagues and my readers) sees the sums.

   So whether you see it or not, power is still the bottom line.

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