Page 32 - European Energy Innovation - Summer 2017 publication
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32 Summer 2017 European Energy Innovation
DATA CENTRE ENERGY EFFICIENCY
Let’s not put high performance
servers into a permanent idle state!
By Cecilia Bonefeld-Dahl, Director General DIGITALEUROPE
Plans for an Ecodesign measure power usage rise by a third. This would best practices in legacy data centres as
to increase the energy efficiency run counter to recent trends driven by well as the consolidation of operations
of servers risk side-lining the very market forces, which research1 shows as into new, more efficient locations is a
servers that will further reduce low or flat, despite exponential growth major contributor to managing energy
energy consumption in the future. in data processing. demand.
While DIGITALEUROPE How is the digital industry sector COMPUTING IS COMING OUT OF
fully supports the achieving such consistent energy THE CLOSET
European Commission’s stewardship? Each new generation of However, most important is the shift
efforts to address servers performs better in relation to away from local servers to the cloud.
energy consumption, its proposal to power consumption, through greater Fewer SMEs rely on their own ‘box’ in
limit “idle state” power consumption virtualization and more advanced remote “data closets” or their offices,
may lead to the risk of an increase of operating parameters as they host, which typically remain non-active
at least 10% in energy consumption maintain, share and analyse data. In for substantial periods of time. In
in data centres and possibly even see addition, the propagation of cooling today’s IT environments, workloads
can increasingly be virtualized and
combined on a smaller number of
servers, which are almost permanently
active. If low-usage servers are a thing
of the past, then so should be the focus
on idle-state power consumption.
Idle power is the energy consumption
of a device when it is in a non-active
state waiting for the next work request
to arrive. In the past waiting would
typically represent a large proportion
of a server’s up time, so yesterday’s
models were designed to consume as
little power as possible during these
periods. Nowadays, servers are rarely
not being solicited or accomplishing
demanding tasks in the background
between assignments and are
designed in accordance.
Regulating “idle mode power” would
be counterproductive as the limits
proposed by the Commission inevitably
favour lower power servers and
exclude modern higher performance
models. Higher performance means
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