(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — The University of Michigan will present a new paper next week that says that shutting off idle servers when they are not in use can save up to 75 percent of the energy that data centers consume, according to a report on Science Daily.
Considering that data centers are the foundation of the country’s cyberinfrastructure, house computing, networking and storage equipment, the University of Michigan’s research team will present a paper about improving the energy efficiency of these systems on March 10 at the International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems in Washington, D.C.
Thomas Wenisch, assistant professor in the department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, along with students David Meisner and Brian Gold, have studied data center workloads and power consumption in their paper, “PowerNap: Eliminating Server Idle Power.”
The team used mathematical modeling to develop the energy saving process, including the use of PowerNap to put idle servers to sleep, and RAILS, which stands for Redundant Array for Inexpensive Load Sharing, as a more efficient power supplying tactic.
Data centers continue to consume increasing amounts of energy, accounting for twice the amount as in 2006.
The Environmental Protection Agency anticipates the total energy consumption of the country’s data centers to exceed 100 billion kWh by 2011, with a price tag of $7.4 billion a year.
Data centers are highly inefficient in that they waste most of the energy they take in. This is attributed to the fact that they must be prepared for peak processing demands greater than the average demand.
According to Wenisch, the typical data center will see an average utilization of 20 to 30 percent, staying idle for about four-fifths.
Wenisch and his team’s analysis of 600 servers highlights this inefficiency, revealing that a data center’s average idle period is only hundreds of milliseconds while its average busy period is roughly tens of milliseconds.
And while introducing PowerNap would require data centers to install a new operating system to manage the instantaneous sleeping and waking, Wenish says that the majority of the other technologies that would make this feasible are already available.
Additionally, the new RAILS technique would compliment PowerNap by updating the power supply, replacing one 2,250-watt power supply with a group of smaller, 500-watt power supplies.
The project is funded by the National Science Foundation and Intel.
The university has filed for a patent on the technology, and is looking to team up with an industry partner to bring it to market.
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