Server Makers Turn Attention to Energy Efficiency

As the information explosion and data center building boom continues to play out, server makers are increasingly turning to new server designs that squeeze more computational work and storage from the same watt as their earlier, less-efficient brethren.

In some ways, the ongoing exponential rate of growth of data is old news. After all, we have been living with this explosion for about two decades now, ever since the World Wide Web slipped into the mainstream in the mid 1990s.

However, that familiarity belies the fact that we continue to need better ways of storing and serving data. Speed is always nice, but in addition to faster data access, the world is demanding that the process of storing and serving data consume fewer electrons than it has in the past.

This is particularly true of the cloud data centers that consumers and businesses increasingly are using to store the vast treasure troves of bits and bytes that we are generating. In fact, data centers are consuming so much power that the Department of Energy is considering setting electricity consumption standards for servers.

Among the firms that are looking to lead in the era of energy-efficient server designs are Calxeda. The Austin, Texas-based startup is generating attention with its server design, which is based on ultra-low power ARM processors.

The company says it can cram up to 120 low-power servers into a 2U chassis. Each node consumes only 5 watts of power when running standard Linux, and can deliver a 10x improvement in performance-per-watt compared to traditional designs, the firm says. This approach has led to partnerships with HP, Avnet, and others, including Penguin Computing, which is using Calxeda systems to build an efficient cloud storage system.

Another firm looking to eliminate idle processor time is Lopoco, a startup that stands for Low Power Company. Last month, the Silicon Valley firm started selling Intel Xeon-based servers that it claims cost up to 80 percent less to run than traditional X86 servers.

Lopoco’s secret sauce is in the overall design of the server, according to the company. Compared to a traditional server that consumes 200 watts at idle and more than 600 watts at total design capacity (TDC), the Lopoco servers idle at 28 watts, and consumes 100 watts at TDC. What’s more, the servers run on standard 110-volt equipment, like the kind you can get at Home Depot, it points out.

While the company admits its servers has less theoretical maximum capacity than the “arc welding monsters” people are drawn to buy today, the fact is most application don’t efficiently utilize multi-threading anyway. Over-provisioning servers to run applications that can’t use that power is a waste of money and energy, the company says.

Software developers must eventually start playing a bigger role to wring the highest levels of efficiency from data center operations. Legacy applications, in particular, mostly lack the capability to take advantage of multi-threaded processors.

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