"Before, you just bought it; now, you look at the big picture," said the data center manager for the city of Virginia Beach, Va.. That means matching a chip's performance and energy requirement with its workload rather than just buying the fastest-performing chip in every instance, he said.
Raymond Sullivan, CIO for the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs Northwest Network in Portland, Ore., is also concerned about server heating and cooling.
Sullivan recently contacted Sun Microsystems Inc. about its new UltraSparc T1 chip, which has eight cores and uses 70 watts. Because of its relatively low energy use and performance, "we have a lot of interest in it," he said.
Considering consolidation
The federal agency's regional operation is considering consolidating 22 data centers into one primary center and a backup, Sullivan said.
The VA's Northwest Network isn't running Solaris, which is the only operating system that the T1 chip supports today. Sullivan said he will be more interested when Sun adds Linux support to T1. The company last week pledged to enable Linux support but hasn't said when it will arrive.
Sun last week unveiled a pair of T1-based Solaris servers and at the same time began an effort to convince IT managers of the benefits of the chip's increased performance and low power consumption.
IT managers looking hard at heating and cooling issues are getting some help from other chip vendors as well.
For instance, Intel Corp. plans to release early next year a dual-core chip, code-named Sossaman, that uses 31 watts of power. In contrast, Intel's highest-performing dual-core Xeon, the Paxville MP, uses 165 watts. And Advanced Micro Devices Inc. has made the relatively low power usage of its dual-core Opteron chips (55 to 95 watts) a key selling point.
Lower-power chips may offer IT operations some help, but it was clear to attendees at the Gartner Data Center Conference here last week that server densities are moving inexorably higher as more performance is packed into chips to meet the growing needs of many users. Consumption Grows
The largest rack systems today, which have 98 blades in seven chassis, can consume as much as 24 kilowatts of power. As chips improve and densities increase, servers consuming 35 kilowatts or more aren't far off, said analysts and data center consultants at the conference.
"I see the [energy] problems growing," said Peter Gross, CEO and chief technology officer at New York-based services firm EYP Mission Critical Facilities Inc.
Mike Bell, an analyst at Stamford, Conn.-based Gartner Inc., said there is huge demand for solutions to the power problem, and he expects more products to emerge as more vendors respond. "Where there is huge demand, there is innovation," said Bell.
One of Sun's T1 server beta testers is Fiducia IT AG, an IT provider in Germany for 900 banks that runs about 20 million transactions per day through its Java-based systems. Fiducia intends to soon start upgrading to the new chip, according to Matthias Schorer, Fiducia's technical chief architect.
Fiducia has 800 UltraSparc-based Sun Fire v440 systems. Schorer said his firm has tested the T1 against those systems and found that it can replace at least four of the v440 servers with one T1-powered server because of its ability to handle additional loads.
A major financial benefit comes in power use, said Schorer. Fiducia estimates that IT can cut the more than US$1.17 million it spends annually on power to about $94,000. "I think it's definitely a breakthrough in IT," Schorer said of the new chip.