Energy consumption vs % utilization?

Tue Oct 26 18:31:20 UTC 2004

Hello,

I've done quite a bit of studyin power usage and such in datacenters over 
the last year or so.

> I'm looking for information on energy consumption vs percent utilization. In 
> other words if your datacenter consumes 720 MWh per month, yet on average 
> your servers are 98% underutilized, you are wasting a lot of energy (a hot 
> topic these days). Does anyone here have any real data on this?

I've never done a study on power used vs. CPU utilization, but my guess is 
that the heat generated from a PC remains fairly constant -- in the grand 
scheme of things -- no matter what your utilization is.

I say this, because, with a CPU being idle of 100% utilized, they still 
are grossly inefficient, on the order of less than 10% in all cases (ie, 1 
watt in returns at least .9 watts of heat, no matter loading of the CPU).

-- Alex Rubenstein, AR97, K2AHR, alex at nac.net, latency, Al Reuben --
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