Bladewatch.com

Hi Martin,

Can you summarize a few points about creating an energy efficient blade solution, what would you look at?

Regards

Naresh

Hi Naresh,

Great to hear from you, off the top of my head, if we wanted maximum efficiency, I would be thinking about:

• Right size the infrastructure for the application – this can be the processor, the network, storage and memory, or something as simple as choosing the mid range processor rather than the super fast one to gain the maximum benefit in performance per watt.
• Look at san boot or solid state disks, so we reduce the power/heat generated from the individual blades, also could we have a single image which blades boot from and a temporary write disk, rather than 600 copies of Windows, application and configuration files?
• Integrated network switches to reduce cabling and power consumption – what can we do on the network side to improve not only the efficiency of the network, but the performance of it, can we optimize the code, optimize the infrastructure configuration to achieve the most, using the right firmware, the right switches and vendor recommended configurations.
• Look at the power technologies, can the blades be configured to power down when not in use, can we have energy efficient power supplies, and the own vendor specific tools to improve efficiency out of the box
• Look at data center design, can we use fresh air cooling combined with more effecient air flow and distribution to ensure that we are not wasting effort on in effective heat spots.
  Look at the data center operations in terms of reducing the number of kvms installed, working more in lights out, can we be looking at DC power? Will that help with our energy costs? What differences can we make to the operating temperature, would 25 degrees Celcius not give us reduced cooling costs and have a marginal cost on my hardware support costs – even more so if it is a grid environment, if a grid engine were to fail, do we care?

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.